


The Death of Innocence

by xLion_Heartx



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: A number of people live, AU, Amy Harrison Lives, Characters and relationships added as I go, Ed Lives for a while but he isn't involved for a while, Gen, Gonna be honest it's an odd AU but I hope I make it work, Kids in the apocalypse, Multi, Shane Walsh Lives, Sophia Peletier Lives, Sophia’s POV, idk what i'm doing with merle rn, oh yeah
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-07-25 06:30:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 35,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16191986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xLion_Heartx/pseuds/xLion_Heartx
Summary: When the world ends and you're a kid, you have to grow up. Fast. Any innocence you could've had before the dead started rising is either killed or will be killed as the world tests you for every ounce of strength, intelligence, and luck you could have.This is true for Sophia and Carl. They have to grow up, or they will die.





	1. The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who's a tragic excuse for a fic writer and started a new project despite literally nothing else being done, not even my own school work.
> 
> Idk how good this'll be, I haven't written for TWD ever and I hope I do things well by you readers. Enjoy! <3

Sophia. An orphan from Atlanta with a heart of gold but a life of difficulty. The orphanage she lives in isn’t the best, the carers aren’t very caring and the food is definitely below average; she’s only ever been to one foster home but when they had enough of her she was sent back and almost deemed ‘defective’, never getting sent to other foster homes ever again. 

Despite the lack of proper care provided to her and the other kids she lives with, they get a lot of freedom (probably because of the lack of care), at least five of the girls on her floor have a criminal record for things from petty theft to assault of an officer. Sophia thinks the worst thing she’s done is make friends with the pizza delivery guy Glenn back when she was 10 (to be fair he is the sweetest guy, even now at 19). 

They don’t go to school, Sophia takes online classes unlike everyone else who flunks at everything and then she takes archery classes in the afternoon at the local sports centre. She has a decent routine going - for a 12-year-old - it keeps the carers off her back and keeps her mind off how bad her situation probably is.

It’s about to get a lot worse. 

* * *

She thinks it’s a normal Tuesday archery session when Glenn comes bursting in, still in his delivery uniform and face as white as a sheet. Clearly he’s come from work, but Glenn never skips work and he certainly doesn’t leave work in his uniform - plus he very rarely comes down to the sports centre when she has a lesson because he  _ knows  _ that legally he isn’t her family and they won’t let him take her without some kind of identification from the orphanage.

“Sophia we gotta go,” he swallows thickly. 

Her teacher and the other students look at him dubiously, confusion and irritation clear in their eyes; whatever question her teacher was going to ask is dissolved when something smacks against the other door to the practice room.

Alice - on of the other students - screams just as Sophia spins around to see the most  _ disgusting  _ thing in the world: a guy, one eye missing, skin grey and half his guts spilling from his stomach. Bile surges up her throat but she swallows it, unlike Kenny who throws up any contents of his stomach, her gloved hand clenches around her bow and she takes several steps backwards towards Glenn, her quiver at her hip knocking against her leg.

Her teacher gathers the other students behind her but right now Sophia knows Glenn has some kind of idea about what’s going on or he wouldn’t be here, she trusts him the most right now. She folds her bow slowly as if moving any quicker will set the guy at the door off or something, placing it in her bow to reach her hand behind her to find Glenn.

The second her grabs her hand they turn and bolt, Sophia will return her borrowed equipment when she knows what’s happening. She jumps into the passenger seat of Glenn’s little red delivery car as people move around her, haphazardly tossing her archery stuff into the back seat.

“What’s going on?” She asks finally, buckling herself in and looking to Glenn with panicked eyes. She’s read reports about an infection hitting other states for the past two weeks but she thought it was completely bogus until now; the orphanage had seemed so calm when other kids had asked about it.

Sirens are going off everywhere, heading in the directions of the hospitals in the city but then there are normal people recklessly speeding towards the highways out, but then there’s also people moving  _ into  _ the city which doesn’t bode well for the possible dangers outside of Atlanta.

“I dunno, ‘Phia. All I know is that people are dying but not dying and then killing other people - there was supposed to be a refugee camp or something near one of the hospitals but I checked it out and it doesn’t look strong enough to hold so I am  _ not  _ risking it,” he’s not sugar-coating anything which is good, she knows she can to be scared, especially when he is, “I’m getting us outta here, alright? I don’t know where we’ll go but it’ll sure as hell be better than here. Or at least I hope it will.” 

As it turns out, things only get more dangerous. 

* * *

 

Glenn thinks she was asleep when they stopped on the side of the road. She saw Atlanta get bombed and she morbidly wondered how many of the people she knows are dead. The roads away from Atlanta are much emptier than heading towards, so they made it into King’s County after a few days because of Glenn’s need to sleep and their joint agreement to take several back roads in hopes of ransacking a few places and avoiding most of the danger. 

It’s been almost a month now, Sophia’s been keeping count, hoping beyond hope that someone is going to find them and tell them everything’s okay. Unfortunately, she hasn’t had a good enough childhood to convince herself that the world is fine.

She and Glenn have been holed up in the same house for a while, they’re car’s out of gas and neither of them has any idea how to take fuel from other cars not how to hotwire one so everything’s been moved inside and into backpacks in case they have to leave on short notice. The house is nice, clearly someone family oriented used to live in it since any and all indication of photos or photo albums are gone along with a lot of clothes and most of the food; it had been pretty well put together when they’d first found it, but now the mattress from the double bed in another room is on the floor in the living room, one of the inner walls has dents and small holes in it from Sophia continuing her archery practice (Glenn says it’s useful if she gets good at it in case things don’t improve).

King’s County is on the quiet side in terms of the dead and Glenn says he’s only met one other survivor running around but both of them were too wary of each other to talk; so overall, it’s the safest place for them right now, though it is also very lonely for Sophia since Glenn hasn’t let her go on supply runs because she’s not fully adapted yet really. 

Sophia’s on her own right now, Glenn has gone out to try and find some more food, and if they're lucky, water. She's sat on their mattress reading to try and pass the time; wearing black, camo leggings, one of Glenn’s big blue sweaters and tattered, old sneakers.

Something hits the front door and she tenses, sucking in a breathe and standing as quietly as possible. Glenn always comes in through the back so this is either a possible intruder or a walker. She slips her hand into her archery glove, grabs her bow and an arrow from her quiver and goes to the kitchen to climb out the back window.

This is a terrible idea and she regrets it the minute she presses her back to the side of the house but if Glenn’s in a rush, she can’t let some walker stop him from getting inside.  _ This is a terrible idea!  _ Repeats in her head as she sneaks around to the front, peeking around the side, she sees a man - he  _ looks  _ alive - sitting on the doorstep with his head in his hands and clothed in nothing but a hospital robe.

She notches her arrow and pulls it back before sidestepping into the man’s peripherals, her breathing is quick and she hates that she hasn’t stopped being anxious yet. He's muttering something before he seems to notice her, he starts and she doesn't know if she can blame him, she probably looks like shit. But then again so does he.

”Who the hell are you?” God, she sounds so mousey, ”leave or I'm gonna shoot you,” because  _ that  _ sounds threatening.

The man stands shakily, holding his hands up in surrender, ”I-I don't doubt that.” Well he sounds worse than she does so it’s fine, they’re both terrified idiots. “I don’t know what’s going on… this is my h-house. I’m lookin’ for my family.”

“Your family isn’t here,” she watches him visibly deflate, she still doesn’t lower her arrow “but they got out - I think… um - there aren’t any pictures inside.”

He mutters something and leans his weight on one of the front porch posts and sighs. He rubs his face and tugs at his hair before looking back up at her. “What’s happened here?”

Her mouth drops open in astonishment for a minute, “ _ you don’t know _ ?” She doesn’t know why she’s still talking to this guy, he doesn’t give her a bad vibe but Glenn’s told her to be wary countless times.

“Hey, asshole.” There’s a  _ click  _ and suddenly Glenn’s next to her, pointing his tiny handgun at the man, “what do you want? We haven’t got anything so if you’re looking for supplies you’re in the wrong place.”

“He says he’s looking for his family,” she states, dropping her arms and looking up at him, “ _ and  _ he doesn’t know what’s going on.”

So, Glenn tests him on a few things and he manages to answer so many questions wrong that Glenn decides that no one can be that clueless about the past month and a half’s events unless they really had no idea what has been happening. They take the guy inside and he introduces himself as Rick Grimes, the old Sheriff’s Deputy.

“I got shot,” he explains when night falls. He’s changed into some of his old clothes Glenn had brought from the other room. She’s taken her shoes off and has curled up under hers and Glenn’s blanket, resting her head on his outstretched leg, they’re all illuminated by candlelight. “It was probably when this whole thing was starting out by what you’re saying. I’ve been in a coma for a while, I think I woke up at some point before my family left but everything is a bit of a shock really.”

Glenn hums, running one of his hands through Sophia’s hair, “I was on a shift when things started getting pretty bad in Atlanta and then emergency reports were coming through about the refugee camp set up out there but I didn’t think it would hold so I grabbed Sophia from her archery lesson and we got out before the city was napalmed.”

Rick’s really nice, Sophia is absolutely positive that she likes him.

“You’re about my son Carl’s age. God, I hope he's alright,” he says to her with a soft smile and she smiles back; despite her lack of a father in her life, she very much gets that vibe from him. Carl’s pretty lucky, she thinks.

“I heard that a lot of people never even made it to Atlanta because of full-on gridlock getting in so it’s possible your family never even made it to Atlanta and set up somewhere around it,” Glenn offers, “the only reason I think there would be to actually go into the city would be to get supplies and even then I’d suggest going around the outskirts since the place is probably overrun by now.”

Sophia yawns and the boys pause their conversation, she kind of thinks it’s because she’s a kid and probably one of the only ones left at this point. She can’t really process too much as she drifts off to sleep, arms curling around Glenn’s leg.


	2. Atlanta

Sophia pouts tiredly, trudging along with Rick and Glenn as they head to the police station. None of them has changed but she and Glenn have all their stuff in their bags, completely abandoning the house in favour of taking Rick to Atlanta to help him find his family. And hell, even if they don’t find his wife and son, he can just join her and Glenn and she’ll finally have someone new to talk to (not that Glenn isn’t a great conversationalist, but she wants some variety in her social interaction).

Her quiver is now attached to the side of her backpack now to stop it from making a rattling noise when it bounces against her leg. Her bow is in hand and both men have their own weapons: Glenn his handgun, and Rick a big kitchen knife from his house.

On the way, they stop at a gas station so that Rick can grab something she doesn’t know the name of, to carry fuel for the police car he wants to take. He shows Glenn how to syphon gas from other cars but Sophia doesn’t like the smell of it so she just stands guard in case anything tries to attack.

Sophia can’t deny that the station looks a hell of a lot better than most buildings, inside and out. There aren’t any dead bodies and there isn’t any blood anywhere so the three of them are able to relax a little. The best thing about this place: there’s _hot water_! In fact, it’s a miracle there’s even water at all!

Glenn dibs the showers first which means he and Rick get to clean up before she does, leaving her to wander a (very) set area for the sake of Glenn’s sanity. She finds a tennis ball behind the desk in the front office and spends her time either pacing the length of the hallway from the front office to the showers bouncing the ball or - by the time Glenn and Rick get out (Rick in his police uniform - including the hat - and Glenn practically dressed like a baseball player) - lying on the floor and bouncing it against the walls.

“You’re up ‘Phia, don’t take too long and Rick and I are gonna go look for weapons, alright?” Glenn calls, watching her roll onto her front and stand up to grab her bag.

“Okay, I’ll come back in here when I’m done,” she replies.

Honestly? Taking a hot shower has never felt like such a privilege, fluffy towels are a privilege and feeling clean is a privilege; she’s very grateful for all three opportunities. She stands in the water probably longer than necessary just to feel the warmth and she stands in the towel for a nice amount of time before actually getting dressed.

She changes into khaki green skinny jeans and a light blue plaid shirt plus her tattered sneakers and archery glove again. She swings her bag back onto her back, makes sure her arrows and bow are still in place, and grabs the tennis ball to bounce around in the lobby while she waits for Glenn and Rick again.

They don’t take too long, Rick has a bag _full_ of guns on his back and he passes her one of the officer jackets, with the little badge on the arm too; it’s very big on her and Glenn has to roll up the sleeves so that her hands aren’t covered.

“So we’re heading to Atlanta,” Rick says, leading them out to the parking lot when a number of cars are lined up, “we’ll have to leave the car before we go into the city and we’ll have to travel around if we’re looking to find anything.”

Glenn nods, “I know my way around the place like the back of my hand so if we need to make any quick escapes we can do.”

Sophia climbs into the backseat of the car, taking the bag of guns and laying it into the footwell before putting her bag on top. She slides into the middle seat and leans forward slightly, “if both of you drive we should get there in a few hours probably. It only took us a long time to get down here because Glenn had to sleep and we veered away from the highway pretty quickly.”

“I see we have a smart one,” Rick praises with a small smile, looking at her through the rear view mirror as she buckles herself in.

They only make one stop on their journey. It’s at another gas station at the edge of the county, they don’t need to, but Glenn’s developed paranoia won’t let them leave their safe zone without more than enough gas to get them to the next one. And then they’re just driving along the road, Glenn fast asleep with his head against the passenger side window.

“So what was life like for you?” Rick asks, leaning back in his seat slightly as he drives, “you know I’m a police officer, I’ve told you about my family, so what about you?”

“Ain’t got family, closest thing is Glenn,” she replies, lying across the whole back seat with a book in her hands, “Glenn was a delivery boy for this pizza place my orphanage ordered from a lot, that’s how we made friends cause I was one of the only kids not to freak him out - everyone else was a little rough around the edges. I was at one of my archery lessons when he came and got me out; that was when things were getting pretty bad and Atlanta got hit.”

“Life ain’t been that fair to you, huh?” He says, “well I promise that Glenn and I will take good care of you while the world’s like this.”

She offers a quiet _thanks_ before Glenn scares himself awake with his own snore; she laughs at him and Rick chuckles, it takes him a second to get his bearings again.

“Does this radio work?” He asks suddenly, looking to Rick and taking the receiver into his hand.

“Don’t see why it wouldn’t.”

Glenn clicks the button to turn it on, speaking into it uncertainly, “uh- hello, hello? Anyone out there, over.”

Rick snorts, “you know you don’t have to say _over_ right?”

Sophia just watches Glenn grin brightly and shrug.

“Hello! Hello please, are you out there?! Uh- over,” a female voice comes through the speakers and all three of them lean forward in surprise.

“Y-Yeah! Yeah, we’re out here, over.”

“How many people are with you? Where are you? Over.”

“Uh - three, including a kid, we’re going into Atlanta along Highway 85, over.”

A static noise fills the car after that, the person on the other end disappearing no matter how many times Glenn tried to raise them again.

“Dammit,” he huffs angrily, rubbing his face and putting the receiver back where it once sat.

“At least we know people are out there,” Sophia says, tucking her hair behind her ear and sitting back against her seat.

They all go back to a slightly frustrated silence after that. They drive until they get to the point on the highway that all the traffic has built up into a full gridlock at the entrance of the city. Sophia climbs out after Glenn, tightening her bag straps and passing Rick’s guns to him.

“So where’re we headin’,” Rick asks, walking to the edge of the highway and jumping over the guardrail onto the grass.

“We can hug the edge of the city for a bit and maybe find a fire escape or something to get into a store if we’re desperate,” he replies, “but we gotta keep _away_ from the centre and the hordes in there, if not for our own safety then for Sophia’s.”

Sophia rolls her eyes at them talking like she wasn’t right next to them, unfolding her bow and notching an arrow so that she’s prepared.

“I wouldn’t use guns in here,” she says, looking up at both men, “there’s a lotta walkers in there so any noise could make a horde we aren’t prepared for.”

Both nod, putting their guns away and taking out their knives, Glenn takes the lead then, jogging into the very back streets of the city as quietly as possible and making sure he doesn’t lose her or Rick. It’s very empty in the backstreets, the most around being half rotten barricades and abandoned cars (plus all the bodies but Sophia likes to ignore them). Glenn decides that it’s safe enough to move a little further inwards using alleys and _very_ quiet main roads.

She sees it first, the man in the middle of the street they're cutting across with a gun to his head. Rick’s the closest so she grabs one of his wrists and points him out, Glenn’s checking out the next street but comes running back with a panicked expression.

“We can’t go that way. Packed.”

She then points out the man to him and she hears him swear, the man sees them but clearly he’s unhinged and fires the gun anyway, dropping to the floor and she hears the groans from the other street start to move in their direction.

“Alley, fire escape. Now!” Glenn exclaims, shoving her forward first into the alley he’d just been in.

She shoves her bow and arrow back into her quiver so that she can climb the yellow ladder faster. The walkers start coming through and reaching for them just as Rick gets a good enough height above them. She pauses, breathless, on the platform at the top of the ladder, helping Glenn and Rick up after her. They all stop, resting against the railing and looking down at the forming crowd.

“That was too close,” Rick mutters, hand on his hat as he looks down at the horde.

Glenn boosts her up onto the next ladder leading to the roof of the building before saying something to Rick and both following after her. Being this far above all the walkers is interesting for Sophia but she’s a little too scared to lean over the edge of the building to fully look down on them like Rick and Glenn do.

There’s a thick plank of wood creating a bridge between this building and the next. Glenn takes the lead, looking around the roof before pointing out a big trap door leading into the new building; Rick opens it up and the three of them peer into it before Glenn breathes out his anxiety and hops onto the ladder first, Sophia climbs down after and Rick closes the trap door behind him.

Sophia’s found that when she isn’t in a safe area and she hasn’t held her bow in a while, she gets pretty panicky, so running through the little office section of this new building and not having had her bow ready in a little while is making her feel like something bad is going to happen the minute she stops moving. They’re out of another fire escape before she can really allow her mind to wander at all; it’s just stairs so she takes this opportunity to ready her bow again, running down alongside Rick before Glenn stops at the sight of two walkers.

She pulls her arrow back, ready to shoot since she’s close range and quiet but before she can two people dressed head to toe in what looks like armour run out and attack the two walkers with baseball bats. They regard her, Rick and Glenn for a second before one of them yells at them.

“Get in here dumbasses!”

Glenn follows immediately, pulling her along behind him with Rick taking the rear. She lets out a short scream as Glenn is shoved against a wall by one of the armoured people and Rick is slammed against a pile of boxes by a blonde woman pointing a gun at him. Sophia aims her arrow at the woman with the gun, pushing down her panicked breaths to make sure that if she needs to shoot her she can.

“Andrea, Morales hold up! They got a kid we can’t kill them!” The other armoured guy shouts, taking off his helmet and chest plate to reveal a friendly-looking African American man. He points to her in the doorway and she pulls her arrow back a little further.

“Which one of you shot that gun?” ‘Andrea’ asks angrily, completely disregarding the fact that Sophia _will_ shoot her if she tries to shoot Rick.

“None of us!” Glenn exclaims, arms raising in a surrendering gesture as the other armoured guy pushes away from him to take his gear off, “we were just coming in to check it out and get some stuff, there was a guy, we don’t know who he was, but he shot the gun and now he’s dead.”

“Oh wonderful, we’re all dead because of some suicidal asshat that we can’t even kill ourselves,” Andrea says, voice watery and eyes brimming with tears. She lets Rick go and Sophia warily puts her bow away to hug Glenn, arms wrapped around his stomach.

“Why the _hell_ would you bring a kid into this city? And where the hell’d you get all those guns?” ‘Morales’ growls, glaring daggers at Glenn and Rick’s bag before he leads them all into the main area of the building: a store. There are walkers lining the front door, smacking at the glass with their hands and rocks.

“Look it’s just us I wasn’t about to leave her in the damn car,” Glenn retorts hotly, holding her hand tightly as they stand in a group as far away from the doors as they can get, “and where we got our weapons is none of your business, dude.”

The other woman of the group shushes them from their argument so Morales doesn’t respond but his sour face doesn't soften, instead, he turns his attention to the African American man, “hey T-Dog, tried to contact the others?”

The man makes an attempt, twisting the dials but only getting static in return, “got no signal. Maybe the roof.”

As if to tell them _not_ to go up there, a gunshot sounds. Sophia jumps at the sudden noise and squeezes Glenn’s hand.

Andrea looks upwards, horrified and annoyed at the same time, “oh no, is that Dixon?”

The others seem just as irked as her, looking upward before turning and running to the stairwell. Rick follows first, Glenn following and taking her with him when he looks at the walkers at the door for too long. There’s a man at the edge of the roof using a sniper rifle to shoot at walkers; Glenn keeps her stood by the door and follows Rick over to join the group yelling at him.

“You ought to be more polite to a man with a gun,” ‘Dixon’ laughs, jumping down from his perch as if everything is just a game.

Clearly, Glenn gets a bad feeling from the way he talks so he looks back at her and makes a motion for her to plug her ears, she does because, quite frankly, she isn’t sure she wants to hear what he’s saying with T-Dog picking a fight with him. She jumps when they start fighting, letting out a small gasp when Dixon - or Merle she thinks Morales called him - punches Rick over a pipe; she wants to run over and make sure he’s okay but Glenn helps him up and makes an effort of checking she’s where he left her. She makes sure she doesn’t watch Merle beat up T-Dog but unplugs her ears when Rick handcuffs Merle to a pipe and looks over the roof edge to talk to Morales.

Everyone seems to be settling down up there for a moment so she does over to where Glenn is sat on the metal staircase with Rick’s bag of guns behind him.

“So we got Officer Friendly, Chinaman, and this little Pipsqueak,” Merle looks over to her and she slightly hides behind Glenn when she sits next to him, all she can think is _he’s Korean_. “Where’s your mom, kid?”

“Don’t talk to her,” Andrea scolds, “I’d rather not have you ruining the youth of this world, Dixon.”

“How’s that signal?” Morales asks, looking towards T-Dog who’s still trying to get the radio to work.

“S’like Dixon’s brain, weak,” the man responds, glaring at both Merle and the radio.

Morales wants him to keep trying but Andrea’s convinced that the rest of whatever group they’re from can’t help them, which is pretty realistic if Sophia’s honest. Morales says their group is a little ways out from the city, apparently, it’s a relatively big group but they’re set up in an old quarry near some woods and water so they’re all pretty set at the moment. All of them just need to make it back in one piece.

“Hey, Glenn’s your name, right?” Morales asks, turning to look at Glenn and her, Glenn nods, “good. Check the alley, you see any manhole covers?”

He gets up and runs along the metal platform, she tilts her head to watch him peer over the side of the building, “no, must be all out on the streets where the walkers are,” he says, walking back and standing just behind their bag of guns.

“What about in this building?” Sophia says, shrinking a little when everyone looks at her and she realises she hasn’t spoken at all around these new people, “buildings like this should have a drainage tunnel that leads into the sewers in the basement in case the city floods.” She should know, the number of times Tammy and James from her orphanage would drag her down to the one in their building is ridiculous.

“How do you know that?” The other lady says, “you’re right but how would you know?”

She stands, making sure her bag is on her back decently before piping up again, “orphanage I lived in had one.”

Rick comes over to her and crouches down to her level, “Sophia, can I ask you to stay up here with Merle and T-Dog?” He says, holding up the silver key to Merle’s handcuffs, “I’m putting you in charge of keeping this safe and getting Merle down when it’s time to leave. Can I trust you to do that?”

She nods but her eyes water a little, “you and Glenn’ll come back, right?”

Glenn squats down next to her and punches her softly in the arm, “don’t go getting too squishy on me, Sophia,” he jokes, “you’re a badass and we’ll be fine. When have I ever not come back for you?”

“We’re just going downstairs for now but you can watch over the side of the building in case we leave, okay,” Rick says, “don’t let Merle know you have this key.”

She takes a deep breath in and nods confidently, taking the key and putting it into the pocket of the police jacket she still wears. She wraps her arms around Rick’s neck and hugs him tightly, smiling when he hugged her back before she gives Glenn another strong hug and trots down the stairs to sit next to T-Dog. Rick leaves the bag of guns with them but far away from Merle and tunes his radio in with T-Dog’s so that they can keep in touch in case anything changes and they can’t get back.

She takes her bag off finally, setting it down on top of the gun bag and leaning back against the roof ‘wall’ (if she can even call it that) and watches everyone else filter back down the stairs.

“So you good with a bow then?” T-Dog asks her when everyone is gone, leaning forwards to get a look at her quiver attached to her bag.

“Kinda,” she replies, tucking her hair behind her ear and looking over the equipment she used to be so certain she’d return, “I was taking lessons before everything and I guess it was lucky I was in a class when Glenn came to get me.”

“You said you was from an orphanage,” Merle says, voice weirdly mellow for the shouting man he was earlier, “you know your parents?”

She shakes her head, “never. The carers wouldn’t tell us our parents’ names if they dropped us off as babies and I’ve never been brave enough to steal my file like some of the others I lived with.” She opens up her bag and grabs a bottle of water, taking a small sip before offering some to T-Dog, he takes it gratefully and sips it before giving it back to her.

“You know Rick?” T-Dog asks curiously.

She shakes her head again, sliding across the space to offer Merle some water. He looks a little wary at first but eventually takes some when she stares at him long enough.

“Glenn and I had been camping out in Rick’s old house. He’s been in a coma since before all this started so we helped him out with getting adjusted and we all decided to stick together while we find Rick’s family.”

T-Dog makes a _huh_ noise and she can feel him staring at her staring at Merle until the - quite confused - man hands her the water bottle back and she slides back to her old seat.

“So Officer Friendly leaving me handcuffed here until he gets back with that key?” Merle asks, pulling one of his legs up to his chest and folding the other under that one, resting his arm on top of it.

“I’m not surprised,” T-Dog retorts before grumpily turning his attention back to the walkie-talkie in his hand. “Anybody out there? Hello? Anybody read? I’m hoping to hear somebody’s voice cause I’m gettin’ sick and tired of hearin’ mine.”

“Well that makes two of us,” Merle retorts snappily, Sophia bites the inside of her cheek to stop herself from smiling because she knows the two of them don’t really like each other.

She gets a small inkling that the two of them are trying very hard not to argue or insult each other on the pure basis that she’s there. She appreciates it, even though she’s probably heard worse uttered by people far younger than them, but she likes that they’re being civil even if it is just because she’s a kid.

“You’re not gonna fight Rick when you see him again, are you?” She asks suddenly, crossing her legs and resting her chin on her hands.

Merle looks away from her with a mild frown, “naw, everyone would outnumber me anyways so it’s pretty pointless.”

She smiles at him before her attention turns to T-Dog’s radio, Rick’s voice coming through, “hey, can one of you check the area, find a clear space and some kinda truck? We’re makin' a new plan.”

T-Dog hands over the walkie and some binoculars, she goes over to one of the edges, standing awkwardly on the pipe closest to it so she can get a better look, she peers out “hey Rick. There’s a construction site nearby with a van that could fit everyone, will that do?”

“That’ll do fine, Sophia, thank you.” And then his voice disappears again. 

She folds her arms on the wall and rests her chin against them, looking out at the walkers and the construction site as her leg bounces anxiously. She has no idea what they’re all doing but T-Dog leaves her with the walkie and heads downstairs so that he’s in the loop with everything. Leaving her alone with Merle.

“So the Chinese kid,” the man starts.

“He’s Korean,” she responds without looking away from the site.

“Right. He like your dad or somethin'? I get that you don’t know who your parents are and all but he like your replacement?”

She shrugs, “nah he’s more like an annoying older brother,” she turns and goes back over to him, sitting down and crossing her legs, “he’s only six years older than me anyway so it’d be a little weird if I considered him like my dad.”

“Well I’ve heard worse,” Merle responds, she snorts and looks down at the radio in her hand, wondering if she can get through the whatever base camp Merle’s team is in.

“Hello?” She pipes up, raising the device to her mouth and leaning back in her arm, “Hello - uh - Merle’s base camp? Anybody out there, please talk we’re losing our sanity,” she talks a little sarcastically by the end and she sees the man in front of her snort in amusement and grin almost triumphantly but she only calls it his base camp cause he’s right in front of her.

Thunder rumbles above them as someone pipes up on the other end, it’s a guy and he sounds relatively old, “Hello? Reception’s bad on this end, repeat, repeat.”

Clearly, Merle knows who that is so she passes the radio over to him so he can talk into it, “Dale, asshole, we’re trapped in a department store made a few new friends but some of us ain’t got no idea what everyone else is up to tryna get us outta here.”

Then there’s static again and both of them groan in annoyance, Sophia leaning to lie on her back and look up at the storm clouds brewing above, and take the radio from Merle again, “well _that_ was helpful.”

The first few raindrops surprise her, making her sit up and look at the sky, she feels like this rain is screwing something up _badly_ and she wraps herself further into her police jacket, hand slipping into the pocket with the handcuff key in it. She gets the feeling that they’ll be leaving a hell of a lot quicker than anybody would’ve expected, the radio pipes up, Glenn’s telling everyone to get down to the main floor of the store.

She stands lightning fast, swinging her bag onto her back and grabbing Rick’s gun bag. She shoves the strap over Merle’s head and hastily grabs the key from her pocket to unlock the cuff attaching him to the pipe and instead attaches it to her wrist.

“Kid, what the hell you doin'?” He asks, “how the hell do you know I ain’t just gonna take you and all these guns and go my own way?”

She yanks him to stand with as much strength as she can muster, slipping the key back into her pocket and shoving her hair from her face, “cause you’re not a bad guy, let's go!”

He doesn’t argue and they head for the stairs, she leads the way and he follows surprisingly quietly. They make it down to the main storefront breathlessly, Morales leading them towards where Rick needs them to be and only glancing questioningly at their handcuffed arms once before they’re all anxiously waiting and listening to the glass of the front doors break.

Morales, Andrea and Jacqui (she finally learned her name) yanks up the chain when there’s a bang on the door, everyone climbing in as quickly as possible for Rick to get them all the hell out. When Morales closes the back of the truck everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

T-Dog look over at her and Merle, both rather damp from the rain and sitting with the backs to the passenger seat and the side of the vehicle respectively, “why the hell did you handcuff yourself to him?” He’s incredulous.

“Cause I couldn’t leave him and I figured it was the only way to get him down here,” Sophia responds breathlessly, taking the key from her pocket again and releasing both of them before giving the cuffs and the key to Rick driving up front, “there. Now we’re all alive and we have loads of weapons.” To prove her point, Merle slips the gun bag off and leaves it at arm’s length from T-Dog and Andrea.

“You are one crazy kid,” Andrea says almost fondly.

Sophia grins, clambering forward to sit in the passenger seat next to Rick, “where’s Glenn?”

“A distraction,” he responds, tilting his head to look at her and make sure she’s in one piece with all her stuff, “that car alarm going off, that’s him.”

“Must be having a blast,” Jacqui comments, sitting down next to Andrea for the drive back while Morales provides directions to their camp that Sophia relays to Glenn through their radios.


	3. The Quarry Camp

Sophia moves to the back to sit with Andrea when watching the road becomes a little too monotonous, Morales takes her seat instead, watching Glenn drive by in his loud car. She counts her arrows not once but  _ three _ times to keep her mind occupied, draws tic-tac-toe in the dust on the floor of the van and even gets a little tidbit about Merle’s brother Daryl (“ _ looks like he’s not gonna be the only one with a silent weapon at camp”).  _

Glenn slows to drive not too far in front of them when they get closer to the camp, being smart enough to realise that having a stranger drive in with a loud sports care would not be the greatest idea. He does make it into the camp first, the wailing of the vehicle stopping immediately and Sophia praying that he doesn’t get himself shot for his stupid, anxious responses to things.

They drive in a little after and she can see him pinned against the car by a man with curly black hair. Her heart leaps in panic and the minute the door opens she hops out after Morales and the girls.

“Glenn!” She calls, the man letting him go when he sees her to let Glenn run over to her and pick her up in a hug.

“See, I made it back. I promise I’ll always come back,” he mutters into her ear, resting against the side of the sports car but not putting her down. 

She has her arms wrapped around his neck and her legs around his waist. She rests her head against his shoulder and watches the others reunite with who she assumes are their families. They wait for Rick, knowing he’s probably taking a second to sit and prepare himself for meeting more new people. 

She will admit that she does cry when Rick reunites with the family they’ve been helping him search for, she can see Glenn give a soft smile in Rick’s direction even though the man is preoccupied with hugging his wife and son. 

* * *

She stays with Glenn for the rest of the day, her old shyness coming back in the face of all these new people. She only sees a few other kids: Morales’ son and daughter plus Rick’s son Carl; they all seem nice but there are so many new faces that she just has to get used to first. Before she decides to stick with Glenn she attempts to find Merle but an old man named Dale says he probably went off into the woods to find his brother who’s been out hunting, so they won’t be back until morning at the earliest.

Night falls faster than she expects it to, she and Glenn are invited to sit with Rick at the campfire with the rest of the group for dinner. She curls into Glenn’s side as Rick starts talking about his experience before he ran into them, hiding her cold hands in the sleeves of her jacket.

“Disoriented, I guess that comes closest. Disoriented.” Sophia can say that Rick’s a pretty good storyteller, “fear, confusion, all those things but disoriented comes closest.”

“Words can be meagre things, sometimes they fall short,” Dale says, taking a sip from his drink and looking at Rick and his family.

“I felt like my life had been ripped out from under me and put somewhere else. For a while, I thought I was trapped in some - some coma, dream, something I might not wake up from.”

Shane, who sits next to her and Glenn, gingerly offers her a warm drink with a soft smile, she takes it and returns the gesture, not really caring what the liquid tastes like so long as she warms up a little.

“Mom said you died,” Carl says, looking up at Rick in the same way Sophia knows she looks at Glenn when he’s come back from doing something on the cusp of suicidal.

“She had every reason to believe that. Don’t you ever doubt it.” Sophia’s definitely envious of the fact that Carl probably has the best dad in the world by her standards, but by the way Rick’s talked about him in the few days they’ve known each other, she knows he deserves everything Rick gives him. In the same way Glenn says she deserves every bit of affection she gets; which is why he hugs her a lot and lets her hug him whenever she wants to.

Sophia zones out of the conversation when they bring up Atlanta. It was bad enough when they went back there and almost never got out but, strangely, talking about it  _ feels  _ worse to Sophia; probably because her brain takes every little bit about that place and twists it into a terrible memory 95% of the time. She sips at her drink and shifts a little in Glenn’s hold of her, she’s able to pick up on the important information like Shane - Rick’s police-officer friend - being the one to get Carl and Mrs Grimes out of King’s County, and when Rick brings her and Glenn into the conversation.

“I honestly don’t think I woulda survived if Glenn and Sophia weren’t camping out in our house,” he says, eyes turning to the two younger people, “they got me adjusted to things as quickly as they could and helped me navigate Atlanta when we went there.”

“Thanks for helping my dad get here,” Carl says, looking at her with a small smile.

“You’re welcome,” she responds quietly, hiding her face in her cup.

There’s a loud crackle from a different campfire, a man that’s been giving Sophia creepy vibes all day is making his fire bigger and further illuminating him and who Sophia thinks is his wife - she doesn’t know they’re names yet but the woman looks friendly so she wouldn’t mind knowing her.

“Hey Ed,” Shane calls, voice laced with a hint of warning, “wanna rethink that log?”

“S’cold man,” ‘Ed’ responds apathetically, leaning back against whatever he’s resting on and almost completely ignoring Shane.

“Cold don’t change the rules, does it?” Shane gets a little more irked the more he speaks to the man, “keep our fires low - just embers - so we can’t be seen from a distance, right?”

“I said it’s cold. Go ahead and mind your own business for once.” At least Sophia now has a decent reason to not like him other than the vibes he gives off. Some could say he’s a little like Merle but Merle actually has a heart from what she’s seen whereas Ed does not.

Shane gets up and Sophia’s eyes follow him, putting her empty cup on the ground and hugging Glenn a little tighter as they both watch the next exchange. She can’t hear what they’re saying but Ed makes his wife pull the log from the fire which clearly doesn’t look very pleasant. 

“You know it’s pretty brave what you did,” Andrea pipes up as Shane sits down, looking in Sophia’s direction, “trusting  _ Merle Dixon  _ enough to handcuff yourself to him just to get him out with us and those guns.”

“Sophia’s got a pretty good intuition from my experience,” Glenn says, running a hand through her hair and saving her from speaking, “if she doesn’t get a bad vibe from a guy then she’s got no reason not to trust him, not been wrong since I’ve known her so clearly Merle ain’t as bad as maybe he says he is.”

“Well, either way, you saved us a lotta hassle, Sophia,” Shane says, smiling at her again, “Daryl woulda been a handful if you left him, so thank you.”

* * *

Shane finds a spare tent in Dale’s RV, taking time away from his watch time to help Glenn set it up completely, including a lamp and both their backpacks inside. There aren’t any of those fancy camping beds around so she and Glenn just have their own sleeping bags to sleep in, laying them out side by side in the somewhat small space.

Glenn lets her change first, she just switches her jeans for her camo leggings again and drapes her jacket over her bag at the end of her bed. When she steps out to let Glenn change she sees Shane sitting on top of the RV staring at Rick and Lori’s tent, she figures it’s because he just got his best friend back but at the same time doesn’t really think that. He looks down at her at one point, standing away from the rain under the cover of an umbrella set up over a crate like it’s a table. They wave at each other before Glenn ushers her back in the tent before she freezes.

“So how’s everyone feeling here?” He asks when they’re both in their sleeping bags.

She hums softly, “the only person that really feels a little - well a lot - off is Ed, but I’m sure you could figure that out.”

Glenn nods, leaning up to dim their light, “Yeah he does give me the creeps. I feel bad for his wife.”

They both agree on that before the conversation changes subject into something a little lighter for them to fall asleep to.

——

Sophia wakes up in the early hours of the morning, sun partially peeking over the horizon and casting the smallest amount of light onto the camp. She knows by this point she won’t fall back asleep so sits up and slips her jacket on, curling into its warmth. She looks over at Glenn, snoring away softly, and quietly climbs out of her sleeping bag to put her shoes on and leave the tent.

The only other person awake, it seems, is Dale, who’s on watch atop his RV, he and Shane must’ve switched places at some point in the night. While she hasn’t really spoken to him other than a little at the campfire and barely over the radio when they were in Atlanta, she decides to go and sit up there with him. He watches her climb the ladder quietly, not really saying anything until she’s sat cross-legged next to him under his umbrella.

“And What brings you up here this early, young lady?” 

“Woke up when the sun hit our tent, didn’t really want to sit on my own until Glenn wakes up,” she replies, fingers messing with her shoelaces.

“I don’t want to seem like I’m overstepping my boundaries here, Sophia, but what is he to you? Brother? Uncle?” Thank  _ god  _ he doesn’t say dad, it was weird enough when Merle asked that.

She shakes her head nonetheless, tilting her head to look up at him, “just a friend, picked me up from an archery class at the start of all this and, like Rick said, we’d been bunking in his old house over in King’s County until he showed up.”

“And your parents?” He seems hesitant, she can understand why since if a kid watched or knew their parents were dead they wouldn’t want to talk about it.

“Never knew them,” she says honestly, “wouldn’t know if they were dead or alive and I don’t really think I’d have any feelings about it anyway. Glenn’s the closest thing I have to family anymore so even if I found my mom or dad right at this moment, I don’t think I’d care.”

She hears him hum as she turns her attention to looking out over camp, “you’re very interesting. Brave too definitely.”

She smiles at her feet but doesn’t respond, leaving the two of them sitting in a comfortable silence until the camp starts coming alive. Shane appears first from wherever he’s been sleeping, a quirky smile appearing when he sees her sat up there with Dale before he hops into his jeep and drives out of camp (“ _ he’s going to get water from the quarry _ ”). Amy and Andrea come out of the RV a little after him and then people just continue to filter out of their tents until she sees Glenn groggily leaving their tent in a flannel and jeans.

She quickly says goodbye to Dale and climbs off the RV to go see him and change into better day clothes. They hug each other in passing before she disappears into her tent; she changes into knee-length denim shorts and a purple t-shirt, slipping her jacket on top of that too.

She sees Rick talking to Carol when she comes out again, smiling and waving at him when he turns and sees her. She stuffs her hands into her pockets when he goes to talk to Glenn and looks around camp, spotting Mrs Grimes with Carl at the washing line with Amy and Andrea.

“Um - hi, Mrs Grimes,” she greets shyly, bouncing on the balls of her feet.

She smiles at her and laughs, “oh no sweetie, none of that ‘Mrs Grimes’ stuff, makes me feel old. Just call me Lori.”

Sophia nods before turning to Carl, “hi, Carl.”

“Hi Sophia,” he greets standing up from where he’d been sitting and waving a little.

“Hey Carl,” Lori calls, both children looking up at her, “why don’t you go play with Sophia, I’m gonna talk to your dad when he’s finished with his new friend over there.”

He nods and runs off with a wave for her to follow him. She does and they run out into the forest, with Jacqui watching from a distance, and while they’re prancing around she wishes she’d brought her bow for target practice.

“So you know how to fight?” Carl asks after a minute, eyes gleaming with interest and admiration.

“Kinda,” She replies, shrugging one shoulder, “I’m not  _ super  _ skilled with a bow yet, especially long distance shooting, but I guess I’m kinda strong cause of that, and I can’t really fight hand to hand cause I wouldn't know what to do and I get scared kinda easily, but I guess I’m not that bad.”

Carl leans against the tree closest to him and folds his arms, pouting slightly, “my mom won’t let me learn how to fight, she says there’s no point cause we’re safe out here and I’m too young.”

“I’m sure she’ll change her mind eventually,” she says, trying to sound supportive, “I mean, it wouldn’t be smart to keep able-bodied fighters untrained for too long.”

Carl grins triumphantly, “you’re pretty smart.”

She’s about to answer when they hear Jacqui scream. They turn to look at her and Carl wails out a cry while she screams too. A walker bites into Jacqui’s neck, blood pouring from the wound and making her fall. Carl grabs Sophia’s hand and they run away from it, climbing a small formation of unstable rocks as quickly as they can as it reaches for them. She squeezes Carl’s hand tightly and kicks it in the face to knock it away from them while they climb higher. He calls out for his mom, the two of them scrambling further up the rocks until the walker gets distracted by a deer falling next to it.

Shane, Rick and Glenn come running into the area, looking down at the walker now feasting on the deer and looking up at the two of them at the top of this rock formation, crying and panicking and staring at Jacqui’s body by the tree line. Rick stabs the weapon he has through the walker’s head before it can notice the three of them are there, the monster falling limp on top of the deer.

“That’s the first one we’ve had up here,” Dale says, eyes frantically staring at the body as he and Jim appear in the area, “they never come this far up the mountain.”

Jim says the walkers are running out of food just as Rick and Shane come over to them. Carl immediately slips into his dad’s arms and clings to him for dear life.

“It got Jacqui,” Sophia whimpers, slipping down the rocks to where Shane can grab her, “it got her and we didn’t even notice it.”

She can see Glenn and Andrea kneeling by her body but Shane moves so that she can’t look at it over his shoulder.

“None of this was your fault, they were gonna make it up here eventually,” he says to her. She looks at Carl held in Rick’s arms and reaches her hand of so he can squeeze it again.

The trees rustle and those with weapons make a protective line in front of her and Carl only to be met by Merle and a man Sophia assumes is his brother Daryl.

“Son of a bitch,” Daryl groans, moving the brush to look at the dead deer and walker, he looks a little rough and mean like Merle but his eyes seem to soften when he sees Jacqui’s body and Sophia and Carl.

Rick leaves the area with Carl while Daryl and Merle look over the deer, Shane passes her over to Glenn who hugs her like she’s going to disappear if he lets go. Shane follows Daryl back into camp to help him store the squirrels he caught, Jim and Dale go to get Jacqui and move her to a place where the group’ll hold a funeral.

“Heard you screamin’ from a mile off, kid,” Merle says to her as Glenn walks back to camp.

“Sorry…”

The funeral they have for Jacqui is small and quiet, but it's something, Sophia places a blue wildflower she found on top when most of the others have left.

* * *

Because of the sudden breach in security, Rick gathers all men (plus Andrea because she was adamant she had to be a part of this talk) and they start discussing ways to set up and search a perimeter to try and protect everyone better.

She sits with Carl in her tent when this is going on, door open so Amy can watch over them. They’re just playing with a deck of cards in silence, neither of them particularly wanting to make conversation after what happened in the woods.

They’re called out when a decision is made, Glenn, Andrea and T-Dog will be heading down the hill to scope out the road leading up to the quarry while Rick, Merle and Daryl will be heading the other way to investigate the forest a little more extensively than the Dixons normally would for hunting. She hugs Glenn and Rick goodbye and offers a small wave to Merle and T-Dog plus a quiet  _ goodbye  _ to Daryl since she barely knows him; each of them takes a gun and some ammo from the bag that has been sitting in Dale’s RV since the group got back from Atlanta.

Lori once again leaves Carl and her, this time with Morales’ wife and another woman Sophia can’t remember the name of. If she’s honest she’d rather be with Amy or Carol but both of them are down in the quarry doing laundry since Andrea’s left with the boys, and Jacqui… well, she’s gone now, but she and Carl are trying to forget about it since no one else seems to be mentioning it.

Shane comes over to them after Lori has been gone for about twenty minutes, “ladies, you go ahead and take a break I’m takin’ Carl down to go catch frogs.”

“Can Sophia come?” Carl asks earnestly, standing up and looking up at Shane with pleading eyes.

“I don’t see why not,” he responds, smiling at the two of them.

“I don’t wanna catch frogs but can I come down to do some target practice?” She asks instead.

Shane shrugs one shoulder, “Glenn mentioned you had a knack for a bow, I’d like to see what kinda fighter you are, go for it.”

She and Carl excitedly run over to her tent, she unties her quiver from her bag and slips it onto her back, unfolding her bow and putting her archery glove on. Carl looks way more than impressed.

The quarry’s huge, making it down there is a bit of a trek and it gives time for Carl to ask  _ a lot  _ of questions about her archery; Shane doesn’t stop him but he does laugh at the embarrassed blush that grows on her face at the other kid’s amazement.

Carl and Shane sit by the water and Shane begins explaining the process of catching fish to Carl while Sophia has a look around for some things she can shoot without breaking or dulling her limited number of arrows. She finds a plank of wood pretty quickly and Amy pushes a crate through the water for her to use to stick it up in.

She takes a few steps back and stops at the distance she knows she can’t always hit at. She takes a few breaths, notching an arrow and trying to ignore not only Shane and Carl watching her but also Amy and Carol from across the water. She hits the target, just not quite where she wants to, it’s too low down from where she wanted it to go but at least she hit it. As she practices, the boys go back to frog fishing though Carl does sneak a few peeks at her progress when he doesn’t have to pay attention as much. Overall she thinks it wasn’t a bad practice, she missed a few shots but manages to get a few distances consistent enough that she moves a few steps back from where she started which is a win for her. 

She takes a break after collecting her arrows from her third different distance practice, putting them back in her quiver to sit next to Carl and watch Shane get in the quarry water “ _ to do this the old fashioned way _ ”. The old-fashioned way is apparently splashing around in the water which makes Sophia giggle and slide away from the shore to avoid getting attacked by water. Carl still doesn’t catch anything but that trick is fun while it lasts.

She looks over to where Amy and Carol are scrubbing away at clothes, Ed just watching them and not doing anything the help out. She tells Shane she’s going over and he tells her to holler if Ed tries anything violent. 

“I’m here to help out,” she announces somewhat brightly, making her way over to Amy and placing her quiver down on a rock.

“Well how kind of you, Sophia,” Amy laughs, passing her an empty crate, “can you head over to the car and fill this up with dirty clothes please.”

She nods and jogs over, placing the crate on the open trunk and filling it while  _ trying  _ to ignore Ed glaring at her. 

“So what do you miss about the old world, Sophia?” Carol asks her when she gets back down to them, placing the crate between the two women and sitting on the rock with her quiver until they give her another job.

“Um… convincing Glenn to take my friends and me roller skating when the carers wouldn’t,” she says with a smile.

“I’ll bet you guys were a handful, huh,” Amy laughs.

“Oh yeah, he lost Camilla and Jackson at one point and he almost called the police but then realised he couldn’t because those two already had criminal records for illegal alcohol consumption and he didn’t want to get in trouble for having a group of preteens and teens with him when he wasn’t affiliated with the orphanage in any way aside from being our main pizza guy.”

Amy snorts in amusement before breaking into a full laugh with her and Carol, both women clearly imagining Glenn freaking out in this disco sports centre with a phone in his hand looking for lost orphans. 

“What’s so funny?” Ed suddenly asks, coming further down the incline to see what the three of them are laughing at.

“Just swapping war stories, Ed,” Amy responds apathetically.

Sophia pulls her quiver onto her back, walking over to stand by the two women, the light mood immediately ruined. She can see Shane watching them like an eagle. With Ed so close none of them can really talk and Sophia inches closer to Amy since Ed’s leering over Carol like a predator.

“Got a problem, sir?” She asks bravely, clasping her arms behind her back and bouncing on her feet, pulling out her best  _ I’m an innocent child and my friends have done nothing wrong please leave so I can stop  _ act that she’s pulled off one too many times in the past.

“None that concerns you, pipsqueak,” he replies hotly, he turns to Carol, “and you oughta focus on your work, s’ain’t no comedy club.”

“C’mon, Ed, there’s no need to be rude,” Amy says, looking back at him, “we were all just having a bit of fun.”

“Yeah well you should do your jobs,” he tosses his cigarette in the ground, ushering Carol up, “c’mon, let’s go.”

“I don’t think she needs to go, sir, she’s been working fine,” Sophia says, stepping a little closer at the same time Amy does.

“I said it’s none of your business,  _ kid _ ,” he practically spits at her, “c’mon, hurry it up.”

Amy grabs Carol’s arm and whispers in her ear but Carol looks close to crying and just wants to go with him. Sophia takes her hand and squeezes it as Ed barks out a threat that Amy glares at him for; without warning he grabs Carol and Amy tries to pull her back but he just starts shouting. Sophia panics, stabbing one of her arrows into his thigh that makes him let go of Carol but only to backhand her onto the ground.

“Ed hey!” Amy yells, pulling Carol back and stepping towards her.

Sophia gets to her knees, holding her cheek with watery eyes as Shane appears, dragging Ed away from the three of them. She sees the first punch but closes her eyes and covers her ears to try and ignore the rest, Amy and Carol are at her sides protectively, Amy trying to keep Carol away from Shane and Ed. 

“Shane stop it!” Both women start yelling, clearly, he’s going a little overboard but Sophia doesn’t want to see it. Her cheek stings.

At some point Amy pulls her hands from her ears and she opens her eyes, Carol’s crying over Ed and Shane’s crouched in front of her, tilting her head to see whatever Ed’s done to her face.

“C’mon, let's get somethin’ cold on that.”

* * *

A couple hours pass, Ed and Carol are in their tent and Sophia sits in the RV with a damp cloth pressed to her face; Amy sits on the opposite side of the table while Carl sits next to her. Shane brought her arrow back, clean of Ed’s blood and her archery stuff is away in her tent now.

“You sure you’re okay?” Carl asks for probably the fifth time, resting his chin on his hand to look at her resting her back to the wall, feet up in the seat.

“I’m okay,” she says softly, nodding gently and offering him a smile.

Amy leans over, taking the cloth and wincing at what’s probably a bruise, “that’ll go down soon enough. Ed shouldn’t have done what he did. Shane’ll make sure he’s kept away from you.”

“You bet your bottom dollar I will,” the man himself says, stepping into the RV and leaning against the back of the seat Carl’s sat at, “hey sorry if I lost my temper out there, but what kind of man hits his wife, let alone a kid.”

“It’s no problem, if Andrea were here I’m sure she would’ve done something similar,” Amy replies with a wry smile.

Sophia looks up at him and she can see him holding back a grimace at her bruise, “thanks for helping, Shane.”

“No problem. You got a good hit in with that arrow of yours, by the way, went in pretty deep. I’m impressed,” he turns his attention to Amy and Carl for a moment, “hey Carl, your mom was lookin’ for ya, Amy, Dale wanted to know if you wanted to go fishing with Morales, apparently you know all about that stuff.”

Carl disappears the minute his mom is mentioned and Amy seems excited to go help do something that isn’t laundry. Shane sighs tiredly, dropping into the seat Amy once occupied and rubbing the back of his head.

“Well you sure as hell look like a fighter with that shiner there,” he says after a minute, pointing to his cheek where her bruise would be.

“I didn’t mean to stab him,” she replies honestly, curling into her jacket as if to hide from his stare, “I guess being in a not-so-safe zone for a whole month has made me a little more violent than I should be.”

“Naw. A guy like Ed? He deserved it, you’re the one that didn’t deserve to get hit,” he pauses for a minute, leaning back in his seat, “Rick give you that jacket?”

She nods, surprised by the question and looking down at the badge on the sleeve, “when we were at the station.”

He nods with a quirky grin, “used to be mine, wondered if he picked it cause he thought I was dead.”

“Maybe… you want it back?”

“Naw,” he winks playfully, “you can grow into it.”

They talk for a little while after that, he asks her what the other kids at her orphanage were like and she grills him on embarrassing stories about Carl she can use to tease him with when they’re both a little sad.

They move when they hear Amy and Morales come back cheering, Shane sits on the RV steps outside the door while Sophia leans on the doorframe.

“Woah! Look at all the fish!” Carl exclaims, pointing at what is, in fact,  _ a lot  _ of fish.

“If Andrea were here we probably would have caught double but Morales isn’t a bad replacement,” Amy jokes, nudging Morales playfully and handing over her chain of fish.

Dale shows up looking a little pale, “I - ah - I don’t wanna alarm anyone… but we may have a bit of a problem.” 

Shane stands, face scrunching in concern as he goes over to the older man. There are no words spoken between them but Dale points up to the hill, Sophia leans out and squints to try and get a better look; Jim’s up there… digging?

She hops down the steps as Dale forms a little group to go up and check on him, she goes over to Carl and sits next to him on a log to watch the group leave.

“What do you think’s wrong with Jim?” She asks, looking at him.

“He was pretty close to Jacqui… maybe that set him off,” Carl replies, “or he’s trying to ignore it like everyone else.”

Their gazes drift back up to Jim, Lori and Carol suddenly deciding to join the group and running after them, leaving her and Carl with the few members of camp she doesn’t know that well.

When the group comes down they tie Jim to a tree away from sight, Sophia feels bad for him but he must’ve been doing something pretty bad for everyone to agree on doing this to him. She and Carl don’t ask questions, they both know they’ll never get a straight answer, especially from Lori who’s pretty adamant on keeping Carl as sheltered as he can be for as long as she can hide him from the world.

When Lori finds something for them to do - because everyone seems to like leaving her and Carl on their own even  _ after  _ the incident in the woods - Carl gets them a place at a crate that has a good view of Jim because they want to check up on him if nobody else but Shane and Dale will; they’ve both agreed that they have to be watching someone if they’re on their own near the woods, they don’t want someone else to end up like Jacqui.

At some point, he asks why they’re so adamant on watching over him and they’re very honest; he seems taken aback at first but does admit that he appreciates “ _ havin’ a couple a’ guardian angels _ ” as he put it. He tells them about a dream that he had that made him start digging, he says he doesn’t remember much but Carl was worried about Rick in it. Jim says some nice things about him and Carl visibly relaxes as having someone verbally convince him his dad will get back.

Shane calls down to them when he sees them talking to Jim, he asks them if they want to help him clean fish and the two of them bolt up to run after him, quickly waving goodbye to Jim and Carl almost tripping over on his way up the hill. Sophia feels a little odd about cleaning things that are already wet but Shane says there’s a bunch of bacteria in the quarry water that could get everyone sick if it’s not all washed off. Carl makes gagging noises when he makes eye contact with one of the fish he’s cleaning and Sophia snorts, Shane chuckling lightheartedly.

The next time Shane goes down to check Jim, Carl and Sophia go with him, standing by the bushes as Shane squats down to meet the other man’s eyes. Sophia’s impressed by how calm Jim is, given his situation; Shane offers to set him free for dinner tonight, Jim smiles in hers and Carl’s direction and they both return the gesture brightly.

They go over to the main campfire, Morales has built a sturdy structure of rocks around it so that the flames can be a little bigger than normal. Carol says Ed doesn’t want to join but nobody outwardly objects to his absence. Sophia sits between Amy and Carl at dinner, enjoying food that isn’t just processed or tinned while she has the opportunity. She smiles when Morales asks Dale about his watch, the old man going on a long anecdote about time and gifts and other stuff Sophia doesn’t entirely understand.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” she says after he’s finished, a small wave of laughs escaping everyone at her blunt disregard for Dale’s speech.

“Hey, me too, let’s go,” Amy smiles, standing up with Sophia and both heading over to the RV.

With the lights on the RV definitely feels like a home, warm yellow light cast across all aspects of the small space. Amy lets her use the bathroom first, she doesn’t take long but lingers a little to stare at her bruise in the mirror nailed to the wall. It’s probably not as bad as it had been a few hours ago but a person can definitely see it against her pale skin.

Amy slides in after her, muttering jokingly about how she can take so long. She goes to the door and pushes it open, only for it to knock against something; the groans immediately alert her to it being a walker. The surprise of it all makes her scream, slamming the door of the RV shut, locking it, and pulling Amy into the back section when she leaves the bathroom. She hopes she alerted the others, she does scream pretty loudly.

Amy hugs her tightly, both girls curled up on one of the beds and tensing every time a walker slams on the RV door. Sophia regrets leaving her bow in her tent and Amy closes the curtains when the guns start going off. There’s screaming outside, Sophia tries to ignore it, she prays that Carl’s okay and that the others will get back and save them. There’s a bang on the window and Amy screams, arms tightening around Sophia as the younger girl’s own nails dig into her sides.

Sophia slips from Amy’s grasp when she hears Carl crying for his dad and Glenn and Andrea calling out for her and Amy. Hesitantly, she unlocks and opens the door, Glenn grabbing her immediately and not letting her go as they cry into each other’s shoulders, Andrea’s sobbing as she hugs Amy.

“I remember my dream now…” Jim says, looking around at the carnage camp has become.


	4. Aftermath

Shane does a head count of everybody when things calm down. Ed’s disappeared but so has his car so it seems he’s abandoned Carol and camp with all of the supplies that had been in the car. A lot of people are dead, Sophia clings to Glenn’s side and Carl’s hand as the other adults are collecting the bodies; walkers go to be burned and the people get buried.

She hasn’t changed yet but her ratty sneakers are  toeing the dirt beneath her feet. Her bag is on her back, she wants to keep it on her at all times now so her bow is on hand, she doesn’t want what happened last night to happen again; if she’d had it she might’ve been able to help and not just cower in the RV with Amy, even though that has kept them both alive.

Merle and Daryl are in charge of stabbing through people’s heads to ensure they don’t turn. It’s a violent job but it lets the two of them release their anger without attacking any of the living.

“What took you guys so long?” She asks, looking up at Glenn, “I mean with getting back from the perimeter check.”

“I don’t know what happened with Rick and those two,” he points to the Dixon brothers, “but I imagine something similar. Andrea, T-Dog and I got ambushed by walkers which made us have to loop around and find a different way back, but that’s how we knew we had to get back here.”

Carol stands with Dale by the RV, having been abandoned by her own husband must sting but there’s an anger behind her eyes that Sophia can’t translate as easily as she can with, say, Merle. She notices Daryl’s eyes flicking up to watch the woman every so often.

“A walker got Jim!” Andrea exclaims suddenly, stepping away from the taller man and towards Amy.

Shane and Rick step into action, Glenn and Lori pulling her and Carl further away from everyone and closer to the fire pit. People begin to circle Jim and he looks tired and scared, Merle grabs him by the arms and Daryl lifts his shirt. The bit is clear and red. _He’s a goner_.

He keeps repeating that he’s okay but Sophia thinks that’s more to try and convince himself than to convince anyone else; she feels bad for him, after all he’s been through he has everyone turning on him because of a bite. Rick waves everyone into a group, Glenn and Lori leaving her and Carl by the fire pit and Amy ushering Jim to sit near the RV; they’re a little far away but they can still hear the conversation, so Sophia imagines Jim can too.

Some of them just want to outright _kill_ him, like he’s some rabid animal in need of being put down and not a terrified man who wants any of this the least of all.

“Why don’t we go to the CDC?” Amy asks, rubbing her arms and leaning on one leg, “weren’t they working on a cure?”

“The CDC’s practically _in_ Atlanta, if that place is gone, surely the CDC went down with it,” Glenn says, looking just as disappointed with his answer as the blonde is.

“We’re looking for security right?” Andrea pipes up, “surely the government would put most of its resources into _protecting_ the CDC from something like this, I feel like it’s the best possible option.”

“We all want that, Andrea,” Shane responds, “but if we’re lookin’ for that maybe we should go somewhere like Fort Benning, the army base.”

“In this kind of situation, it might not be a bad idea to at least check the CDC,” Rick shrugs, “it doesn’t have to be a long search, but if we don’t find anything then we can head straight for Fort Benning.”

Sophia and Carl stand up, looking at one another, Jim, and the group, “we wanna help Jim first,” they say together, drawing the attention of the adults.

“The best way to help Jim might just be to put him outta his misery,” Merle hums, folding his arms and looking at the two of them and the man in question.

“But if there’s a chance we can save him, shouldn’t we take it?” Carl asks.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Amy agrees, tone somewhat exasperated.

Rick and Shane sigh, looking at one another with an expression that probably said they should talk about it later. Shane disperses the group and Rick goes over to Jim to take him into the RV and continue digging the graves for their lost camp members

Sophia watches Andrea roll her eyes dramatically, taking Amy’s hand and pulling her over to the fire pit.

“Well, while the boys discuss what we’re doing as if the rest of us aren’t integral to the team, I thought it would be a good time to give you your birthday present.”

Sophia gasps happily, “Amy, it’s your birthday!?”

The older woman laughs, “I guess it is, huh? I wasn’t keeping track.”

Andrea smiles, pulling something wrapped in pink tissue paper out of her pocket. Amy takes it with a little hesitance, opening it up carefully as to not rip the wrapping too much. Inside is a necklace with a mermaid charm on it, Amy’s ecstatic, hugging her sister tightly and putting the golden piece of jewellery on, charm resting against her collar.

“Thanks, Andrea,” she says earnestly.

* * *

A small funeral is held for those who died, Sophia stands with Glenn and Amy, Andrea on one side, and Shane and Carl on the other. Carl’s crying softly, holding onto his parents’ hands and while Sophia’s eyes tear up, none of them fall; she’s been to a funeral before, for one of her friends’ foster mom.

One the way down she loses Carl when Rick and Lori stop to talk but he ends up crawling into her tent with her after a few minutes, Amy sitting her chair up to read while she watches them.

“I don’t think we’re gonna be able to save Jim anymore,” he says suddenly, eyes teary and hands clutching the pencil he’s been holding tighter.

She nods slowly, dropping her pen and looking up at him properly, “neither do I, even if we wanted to save him… if he was bit last night… they might be too late.”

“What do you think they’ll do with him?”

“Ask him he wants.”

The two of them stay in her tent for the majority of the time people spend deciding what to do. Shane comes to see them during the time they’re in there.

“Hey guys,” he greets quietly, kneeling down in the doorway, “Rick and I have been talkin’ ‘bout what we wanna do about moving camp, figured I might as well ask you guys what you think since you are part of the group.”

“We don’t think it’s worth going to the CDC anymore,” Carl says honestly.

“If Jim was bit last night then we probably won’t make it there in time anyways,” she adds, “we think you should ask him what he wants because he might not want to go anywhere… you know, die somewhere familiar.”

Carl nods along, “and if Jim was the only reason we were gonna check the place out, there might not be any point in going there if he doesn’t want to go.”

Shane smiles, and impressed glimmer in his eyes, “well thank you two for your input, I’ll report back to everyone else and I’ll send Glenn to come get ya when we’ve decided.”

They nod, watching him leave and strut back over to Rick and the others.

* * *

Glenn doesn’t come to get them for another hour. He takes them over to the fire pit without saying much, just sitting on a log and pulling Sophia with him, Carl goes over to his mom.

“So,” Shane starts, silencing any chatter that had been drifting between people, “as you all know, some of us have been discussing what we want to do; Rick and I have asked for all of your opinions, and putting that together we’ve come to a conclusion.”

Rick takes over them, looking towards the RV, “we asked, and some of you,” his eyes drift to her and Carl, not that anyone notices, “suggested we asked Jim what he wanted, we did. He knows that he probably wouldn’t make it to the CDC if we went there, he’s asked if we can leave him here and told us to go somewhere that offers us a better chance of survival than just luck.”

“So what you’re saying is we’re not even going to _try_ and save Jim?” Andrea hisses, fists balling at her sides.

“Not if he doesn’t want it,” Shane answers, shaking his head, “a lot of you said we shouldn’t risk a trip to the CDC since we’ll be stopping in Atlanta. Most of you want to try and make it to Fort Benning, completely skipping past the city and heading the other way. That’s what we’ve decided to do.”

Andrea looks like she wants to argue but Amy places a hand on her shoulder and she calms down. Other than that, there isn’t too much argument though the Morales’ look at each other; Sophia doesn’t think they’re going with them.

Everyone starts packing up camp, putting important items into backpacks and the camping gear in the RV now devoid of Jim’s painful coughing as Rick and Shane take him into the forest. She helps Glenn with the tent as much as she can, trying not to stab anyone with the poles and fighting a little against the breeze to get the fabric folded. Dale is working on getting something from the Atlanta van fitted into the RV to make it run better, but without Jim he just doesn’t seem to be able to get it to work and gives up at some point, trusting his vehicle to do its job and get them as far as it can.

When everyone’s finished, the camp looks empty and sad. Sophia and Glenn lean against the red car that is just there because they can’t do much with it. Shane and Rick come back, standing side by side and looking every bit like leaders should.

“Listen up,” Shane says, voice commanding and serious, “everyone has a radio, we’re gonna be using Channel 40 but let’s keep the chatter down okay. Now you got a problem, don’t have a radio, can’t get a signal or anything at all, you’re gonna hit your horn and we’ll all stop. Any questions?”

Nobody says anything, but Morales steps forward, “we’re - uh - we’re not going.” Sophia knew this would happen, she did, she hardly know the family but the confirmation that she may never see them again hurts, “we have family in Birmingham and we’re heading down there to find them. I’m doing what’s best for my family, even with the risks.”

“Well it doesn’t seem like we can fight you on this,” Rick sighs, bending down to take a couple of the guns from the bag, “take these, they’ll keep you safe for as long as you have ammo.”

Sophia hugs their daughter as well as Morales himself before they leave, waving goodbye as they drive past everyone out of camp.

Shane directs everyone to different vehicles, Merle and Daryl share their truck that has a motorcycle in the back. Dale, T-Dog, Amy and Andrea share the RV, Carl and his parents have their car and let Carol ride with them while Sophia and Glenn hop into the back of Shane’s car. Everyone has a backpack with survival items and at least one weapon in case anyone gets separated and Dale has the rest of the bulkier supplies, like the tents and other camping equipment.

* * *

They get a good distance from camp before the hose on the RV completely brakes again, the whole caravan is stopped, everyone gathering around as they watch Dale check it out.

“If I’m going to try and fix this hose up with the one from your van, I’m going to need an extra set of hands,” the old man says solemnly, clearly thinking about Jim back at camp.

Glenn raises his hand, “I can help, I don’t know much but I’m a quick learner.”

Sophia looks up at Shane who’s looking into the distance through a pair of binoculars, “there’s a gas station up ahead, could probably have a good few things left in there. While you’re fixing that up I can go check it out.”

“I’ll come,” she pipes up quickly, just as Rick and Dale nod in his direction and he jumps back into his car.

“Yeah, I’ll come loot some shit too,” Merle adds, almost begrudgingly, a hand on his hip and the other waving away the glare Daryl gives him.

Shane makes a bit of a face but sighs, “Yeah, whatever, get in.”

Sophia clambers back into her seat, Merle in the back as Shane starts up the car again and drives down the road. It really is a short drive, probably about five or ten minutes; the station looks pretty run down, the pumps probably siphoned dry and some of the glass smashed from early looters.

She can see three walkers lingering at the back of the store, two hobbling but the other just standing there. Shane tries to drive quietly so they don’t notice them too early.

“You think you can hit ‘em?” He asks her, nodding towards her bow, “you got pretty far away during your last training.”

She exhales and looks out at store and walkers, the windows are broken enough that she shouldn’t hit them even if she aims a little wrong, but some of them are so far back that she might not even hit them.

“I can try.”

“That’s all I ask for,” Shane smiles.

She stands up on her seat, rolling the sleeves of her jacket up and pulling her archery glove on. She takes her bow and notches an arrow closing one eye to concentrate her aim and pulling back, she aims a little higher than the closest walker’s head, this one isn’t moving so it’s the easiest target she’s got. She fires, it goes into its left eye and it drops to the floor, she whispers out a cheer, looking down at Merle and Shane who give her little signals to try and get another one.

“I don’t hit moving targets,” she says anxiously.

“They’re not moving that fast, pipsqueak,” Merle teases, “even if you get ‘em somewhere Shane and I can go in and finish them off.”

She nods after a second, biting her lip and grabbing another arrow and pulling it back, “one of them’s behind shelves.”

“Just shoot, kid, you’ll get your arrows back.”

She does, it skims past the edge of the shelf and hits it in it’s chest, it stops moving but doesn’t go down. She hits the next one quickly after the other, hitting it in the knee and taking it to the ground; Shane and Merle climb out of the car quickly, grabbing knives to jump through the windows and take out on walker each. She clambers out of the car and Shane helps her through the window to avoid her cutting herself on the sharp glass and Merle passes her the arrows back.

“You did good, Sophia,” Shane says, ruffling her hair before going around the store to find anything useful and/or edible.

She wanders around a little, splitting off from both men to find a few things for herself and the other girls that she’s noticed they’ve been running a little low on. She finds the aisle end and sighs in relief when most of the products are left there; she pulls her bag from her back, opening it up and taking a few boxes of pads and tampons as well as a couple of bottles of birth control pills that she’d heard Amy complaining about running out of about a week ago.

“What you doin’ over there, pipsqueak?” Merle calls.

“None of your business,” she calls back, closing her bag and standing up, glaring over at where he’s smirking at her from the checkout shelves.

Shane squints at their exchange before he finishes taking the rest of the food he can fit into his bag. The three of them exit the store, looking out for any more walkers and jumping back into the car.

They make it back to the caravan and Dale’s putting the finishing touches on the hose in the RV. Glenn’s hands are a little oily and he looks incredibly confused by what Dale is doing. Merle jumps from the car the second they park up again, going back over to Daryl to sit back in their van.

Sophia climbs to the back of the car, leaning against the frame of Shane’s car, “Amy!” She calls, gesturing for the blonde to come over.

The older girl comes over, leaning against the car door and looking up at her with curious eyes. She takes her bag off and opens it up, Amy’s eyes brighten, seeming to hold back a cheer as Sophia passes her one of the pill bottles.

“If the others need some of these let me know,” she says, watching Shane’s curiously humoured expression from the corner of her eye.

“Will do,” the blonde winks, putting the pills into her bag and skipping off back to Andrea.

“Alright!” Rick shouts, gathering everyone’s attention, “back in the cars we’re back on the road!”


	5. Highways and Farms

Sophia looks up as the sky darkens, stars peeking out from the clouds. Glenn’s fast asleep in the back of the jeep, sprawled out across the backseat with not a care in the world; she isn’t sure how many of the others are passed out, she imagines Carl is, and Amy probably too (if not by her own choice then because Andrea would’ve told her to). They’re on a quiet strip of highway, cars scattered on the other side as well as at the edges, they haven’t gotten stuck yet but being at the back of the group makes it harder for Sophia to see any oncoming threats or possible interceptions. 

“Why don’t you get some sleep, Sophia?” Shane says to her, chancing a glance at her staring at the sky before he turns back to the road. 

“Not tired,” she mutters in return, trying to stifle a yawn and failing.

Shane chuckles, “Coulda fooled me.”

She gives him a half-hearted glare before the whole caravan suddenly stops. Shane gets out, waving at her to stay in the car and watch Glenn as he moves to the front, she stands on her seat and leans on the frame to try and get a better look at what’s stopped the RV which has been leading.  

“There’s a truck, toppled over, blockin’ the road,” Shane explains when he comes back.  He doesn’t get back in the car, swinging around to wake Glenn up with a tap to the face, “c’mon you two we’re camping in the RV, figurin’ out what to do in the mornin’”

Glenn’s still half asleep as he trudges to the RV, Dale welcomes them in, giving Glenn a pat on the shoulder as he goes to the back and collapses on the bed Amy isn’t occupying, he’s asleep again almost instantly.

“Are Carl and the others staying in their car?” She asks, climbing onto the seat at the table opposite Andrea.

“I would assume so, can’t fit everyone in here,” T-Dog replies, slouched in the front passenger seat as Dale closes the RV door and slides back into the driver’s. “I assume the Dixons are gonna stay in their truck too.”

Clearly she has some sort of worried expression because Andrea reaches across the table and takes her hands, “They’ll be fine, they’ve got roofs over their heads unlike you three with that jeep.”

She nods after a second, glancing out of the RV window to try and see either of the other cars. She takes her bag off and slips it under the table, pulling her feet up onto the seat and resting her back against the wall, Shane takes the rest of the seat on her side as Andrea matches her position.

“Merle’s going on watch tonight, says he’ll be fine and will sleep in the morning so you guys can all get your rest,” Dale calls from the front.

“Thanks, Dale,” Shane answers back, slouching into the seat and throwing his hands behind his head to act as a pillow, “g’night y’all.”

* * *

Sophia wakes up in one of the RV beds, sun spilling in through the window and the only other person in the RV being Andrea who looks like she’s taking apart and putting her gun back together to try and get used to the motion.

“Good morning there, Sophia,” the blonde greets when she catches sight of her sitting up in the bed, “Glenn threw some clothes for you on that bed there, said it meant you could get out and keep an eye on Carl faster if you didn’t have to rifle through your stuff.”

Sophia looks over, true to Andrea’s word, there’s clothes sat there with her bag sat on the floor. She closes the curtains to the room and Andrea ignores her as she changes, throwing on a blue t-shirt with a rainbow design on it and some khaki trousers, rolling the end to go about half way down her calf; she throws on her jacket and pulls on her bag after stowing away her old clothes back inside it.

She waves goodbye to Andrea as she leaves the RV, finding Carl sat on the back of the Dixon’s truck (devoid of the motorcycle) with a small gun in his hand, Shane at his side talking him through a few things about it.

“Now I can’t train you properly until we get somewhere secure, so don’t you go usin’ that thing unless it’s the most dire of situations alright?” Shane says, voice serious as he fixes Carl with an authoritative look, he nods, “good. Don’t tell your mom you got that neither, your dad knows but you know what your mom’s like, she’ll bite your head of then mine  _ and  _ your dad’s.”

Another nod and Carl hops down, tucking the weapon into the waistband of his jeans and covering it up with the flannel he’s wearing. He spots her standing by the RV and runs over when Shane waves him off. It’s then that Sophia notices the caravan’s new positions, they’ve moved forward through the small path the downed truck created but got blocked again by a pile-up of cars, she sees Merle asleep in his truck but hears the motorcycle further out on the highway so she guesses Daryl’s trying to find a way through on the easier to maneuver vehicle.

“Everyone’s gone looking for supplies in these cars, Daryl and T-Dog are siphoing gas for everyone,” Carl says, explaining why everyone’s fragmented around the highway, “my dad said I could help look if you came with me and we didn’t stray too far. Wanna go looking for supplies?”

She takes a look around once before nodding and taking Carl’s outstretched hand. They run over to an old station wagon, it’s empty of all people but the back look full of stuff, they open it up and lean inside, pushing away any items that were taken for sentimental value and looking mostly for food and water, and maybe clothes. She can see Carol, Amy and Lori by a group of other cars so she and Carl count it as being in the line of sight of somebody, digging around and finding two and a half bottles full of water plus an entire bag of abandoned tinned food; they carry them back to Andrea in the RV who applauds them for their find before they scamper off a little further but still in the sightlines of Amy.

There’s a stern whisper of  _ herd!  _ From Rick, making motions for them to get down from where he stands by the station wagon Sophia and Carl had searched first. Amy disappears from Sophia’s sight as Lori grabs her and the three older women hide under the cars they’re near. She grabs Carl’s wrist and they slide under the car they’ve been searching as fast as possible, Sophia on the side near the guardrail and Carl by the road, he’s squeezing her hand and they can see Lori holding Carol and Amy looking at them with a finger to her lips.

She and Carl practically crush each others’ hands as the walkers stumble through, Carl looks to his mom before looking back at her and she can tell she looks as terrified as he does. There’s so many of them that it feels like they won’t stop, a continuous stream of walkers until no more pass the car they’re under. Carl, panicked and reckless peeks his head out from under the car and immediately  whimpers in panic, pushing her to get out of the other side of the car. She doesn’t realise why until two walkers drop to the floor and reach for them.

She _moves_ , climbing out from under the car and helping Carl out with her, they trip over the guardrail when Sophia leans back too far and go stumbling. Her arrows fall from her quiver with her bow but Carl picks them up when he stands, shoving them back into it without grace and latching onto her hand as the walkers fall down the small incline behind the rail too.

They run. They run so fast that Rick and Lori’s calls for them seem to disappear with the wind. They’re jumping over rocks and roots, sprinting away from the walkers and through an unfamiliar forest until they’re not anymore.

Sophia lets out a cry of pain as something  _ sharp  _ pierces through the side of her left ankle, sending her and Carl both to the floor. Carl grabs the gun from back of his jeans, holding it shakily in the direction they came from. She looks back at her ankle, as she stands using the tree right next to her; a sharp, jagged fragment of a tree branch or root, and blood, that’s what she sees. The adrenaline in her system numbs the pain she could be feeling. She doesn’t hear the walkers very close, but they’re still following them. Carl stands up next to her and she clamps a hand around the fabric of his shirt to try and calm him down; both of their breathing is shallow.

Carl whimpers at the same time the groans get louder, Sophia’s grip on his shirt gets tighter and Carl goes to fire a shot at one before someone beats him to it, both walkers going down with shots to the head.

“Oh my lord,” someone says from behind them, both their heads whip around, catching the eyes of a large man with a heavy southern accent.

Carl grabs her hand and they hear another gun click, turning around and seeing Rick and Daryl, aiming gun and crossbow at the unfamiliar man. Sophia’s teeth clench, the adrenaline leaving her system slowly and the sudden spike of pain from her ankle drawing a practically animalistic mewl from her. Rick reaches out to pull Carl up to his side and Daryl lets her lean against him instead of the tree as he looks down to check what she’s done.

The man inches forward, “my farm - w-we have someone who can help her.”

Rick passes Carl over to Daryl and Sophia gives her bag to Carl, Rick grabs Sophia under her back and knees to lift her off the ground, he nods at the man and the group takes off running. It’s probably about a mile that they go, her wound aches and stings and any other word Sophia knows to describe pain, the branch fragment pulling at her skin and making the injury much larger to the point where Sophia’s sure she needs stitches.

They break through the treeline and Rick speeds up, overtaking the stranger and racing towards a farmhouse. Carl’s next to them when they reach the door, he knocks on it as loudly as he can, a brunette woman opens it and looks at the three of them, her eyes scan back to the field, clearly seeing the stranger and Daryl and looking back at them.

“Your man said you had someone to help her,” Rick says breathlessly, chest heaving as the stranger and Daryl catch up.

The woman ushers them inside, speaking quickly and calling out for other people, “my daddy’s gone into town with my sister so you’re goin’ to have to trust me on this,” she leads them into a bedroom and Rick puts her down. The woman crouches in front of her and smiles, “my name’s Maggie okay, the guy who brought you in, that’s Otis. This is pretty simple but it is goin’ to hurt, I won’t lie to you there.” 

An older woman walks in with a plastic bowl full of water, Maggie takes it and puts it on a wooden stool that she places in front of her. Daryl lingers by the doorway with Otis, Carl jumping right onto the bed to hold her hand again. Maggie works quickly but gently, removing Sophia’s shoe and sock, Maggie, as gently as she can, pulls the branch fragment out of her ankle and puts her foot and ankle in the water to clean in; the water has turned murky by the time Maggie takes the bowl away.

“We’re with a group,” Rick says suddenly, moving to stand by Daryl as they watch Maggie clean Sophia’s wound with something that makes her hiss and tighten her grip on Carl’s hand.

“Patricia,” Maggie calls, pressing a damp cloth to Sophia’s ankle while she grabs a needle and thread. The older woman appears in the doorway with everyone else, “take one of ‘em with a horse and find their group, bring ‘em down before daddy and Beth get back or he’ll have a fit and he’ll never let this girl heal.”

Patricia nods and Daryl volunteers to go, both leaving the house. Maggie finally threads the needle and looks back up at Sophia, her face clearly trying to keep the girl calm while Sophia panics a little, Rick passes her some painkillers and a glass of water which she takes quickly, Maggie waits a little for them to kick in.

“You’ll be alright.”


	6. The Greene Family

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I didn’t update yesterday like I was supposed to! It was Bonfire Night so y’know, family event and stuff.

Maggie wraps Sophia’s wound up tightly with what bandages Rick can find in the house, tying it so that her ankle doesn’t move much and therefore prevents her stitches from ripping. 

“Don’t go walkin’ on that for the rest of the day alright,” she says, letting Sophia pull her sock back on and remove her other shoe to curl her legs onto the bed; Carl does the same, as well as putting her bag by their shoes, and they lie back against the pillows. 

Maggie nods at them and leaves the room with Otis. Rick comes to sit at the edge of the bed, and smiles tightly at them, lifting his hat off his head and placing it on Carl’s.

“I’m sorry we didn’t catch you sooner,” he says earnestly then laughs with little humour, “you two were fast, if I hadn’t been so worried I would’ve been impressed - I-I am pretty impressed.”

“It’s okay, dad,” Carl responds, smiling reassuringly and crawling forward to wrap his arms around Rick’s neck and hug him, “we’re alive and you found us pretty quickly anyway.”

Sophia nods, moving carefully to hug the man too, “it’s not like  _ you  _ put the branch there. Plus it’s kind of our fault anyway.”

Carl laughs bashfully, blushing and readjusting the hat on his head, “Yeah… I was a little reckless - but we’re okay so it’s fiiiine,” he drags out the last word, flopping back onto the bed.

It sounds like there’s a horse outside which means Patricia’s back and that means the others will be here soon too. Someone rushes up the stairs and then Glenn’s in the room, he skids over to the bed and picks up Sophia in the tightest hug he’s ever given her, arm circling her waist and a hand in her hair; she thinks he’s crying and she can see Maggie watching them from the doorway.

“First I was worried because you took off running and then I find out you got  _ impaled  _ in the ankle by a tree branch, are you trying to put me in an early grave?” He says breathlessly, pulling back to look at her face, he’s got tears running down his cheeks. She pulls her arms from around his neck to wipe them away and he laughs. 

He puts her back on the bed very carefully, at the same time Rick stands up. Glenn turns, seeing Maggie and hastily wiping away any remaining wetness from his face and coughing to make sure his voice doesn’t crack, Sophia smirks, “thank you for making sure Sophia's okay.”

“It’s no problem,” Maggie replies, “now might I employ you boys to help Patricia and me cook up some dinner? My daddy’ll be gettin’ back with my sister soon and he’ll be much more inclined to let your group stay if I can prove you’re helpin’ out.”

“U-Uh, sure..!” Glenn stutters, waving Rick out of the room with him. Carl and Sophia giggle when Maggie winks at them, closing the door as she leaves.

“So how bad d’you think my mom’ll yell at me when she gets here?” Carl asks after a second.

Sophia puts her finger to her chin, feigning a hard thought process before looking at him, “I think she’ll cry and hug you first, tell you never to leave her side again, and  _ then _ rip into you, probably when less people are around.”

Carl grimaces dramatically, nodding slowly, “you’re probably right.”

Sophia reaches down to her bag, lifting it onto the bed and opening it up to dig through all the clothes and small amount of food to pull the two things she hadn’t really touched in a little while: her current read:  _ Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban  _ and a small rolled up set of comics that Carl perks up at the sight of. They sit on that bed for a long time, changing positions as they read, Carl at one point ending up halfway off the bed and reading upside down while she had flipped to the end of the bed with her legs elevated by the pillows.

Sophia counts her group lucky because they show up before Maggie’s dad does when the sky is the orange of sunset. She and Carl can see the RV, the truck (plus Daryl on the motorcycle), the jeep and Lori’s car all pull up near the end of the field that’s part of the farm’s front garden. They create a little semi-circle and everyone appears, they watch the window as Maggie and Otis go out to meet everyone, Maggie holding something that looks like it’s probably food for the group. As they’re watching, Glenn and Rick come back into the room holding trays and chairs respectively.

The two of them turn back over to rest against the pillows, taking one bowl of an honestly wonderful looking stew while the men sit on either side of the bed and eat their own bowls of stew.

“You think everyone’ll be mad?” Carl asks, looking to his dad a little anxiously. He hates getting yelled at by his mom let alone the whole of camp.

“I think they’ll be more relieved than mad,” Rick answers, leaning back in his seat and looking out of the window, there’s a campfire set up and most people are around it, though Maggie and Otis are bringing Lori and Shane down, “your mom might be mad though…”

Carl groans a little, stuffing his spoon in his mouth just as Lori bursts into the room, Shane meandering behind as if just making sure the woman made it without collapsing in her worry. Carl manages to put his bowl of stew down before Lori’s bundled him into her arms as tightly as she possibly can. Sophia puts her bowl down too, sliding to sit up on the bed a little further and let Shane sit down.

“You had us all worried sick,” Lori scolds, pulling away from Carl to stare at both of them, dead in the eye with so much fire it almost scares her, “you are never doing something so reckless like that again, you hear me.”

“Cool your jets, Lori,” Shane laughs, reaching a hand out to placate her, “they ran like hell out there. Could be the best scavengers we got when they get older.”

Lori glares at him, it’s hard and mean and Sophia doesn’t know what Shane ever did to deserve a look like that; there’s an almost unspoken  _ if  _ that Lori doesn’t say but everyone in the room knows she wants to say despite the thought probably sickening her.

The tense mood in the air is broken by Maggie knocking on the doorframe, a small bag tucked under her arm, “I gathered the things I need to patch up your friend, Patricia and Otis have gone to bed so I need an extra pair of hands.”

Sophia, Rick, Carl, and even Maggie herself look towards Glenn; he stiffens a little, putting his bowl down next to Sophia’s and twisting to look at the brunette.

“Y-Yeah, I can help.” Maggie nods and leads him away, they leave the house and Rick chuckles a little, looking out the window.

Shane snorts, leaning forward to ruffle both Sophia and Carl’s hair before he steals Glenn’s chair and runs a hand through his hair.

“I’m gonna go fill everyone in on how you guys are doin’” Lori says, patting Carl’s knee and giving Sophia a quick hug before she leaves the room.

“Mom’s in a bad mood,” Carl whines, throwing a pillow over his face and laying flat against the mattress.

“Yeah I’m sure she will be for a little while, bud,” Shane smirks, leaning his elbows against his knees.

When the sky is no longer light outside, that’s when they hear shouting. It’s Maggie and an older man who Sophia assumes is probably her dad, there’s a third voice too (the sister, her brain supplies) telling both of them to calm down and to ” _ please! Can’t we talk about this is the mornin’?” _

“Daddy, just let these people sleep here for tonight and  _ then  _ we can talk about it,” Maggie says exasperatedly, “the only ones stayin in our house is those two kids and two o’ their own to keep watch over ‘em. That’s it.”

Her dad doesn’t say anything but does come in the house, Maggie rushes in after him as well as a small blonde girl. All her dad does is glare a little and storm off upstairs but her sister seems to perk up at the sight of Carl and Sophia.

“Y’all get some sleep alright,” Maggie says, “I’m gonna make sure the rest o’ your camp’s secure and set for the night and I’ll help y’all talk to my daddy in the mornin’ when he’s a little calmer.”

“Thank you, I mean it,” Rick replies, smoothing down Carl’s hair.

* * *

 

Sophia doesn’t know when she fell asleep, but it’s early when she wakes up. Shane and Rick are gone but the camp in the farm isn’t completely alive yet, Carl’s snoring softly next to her, lying on his front with half the blanket over him. 

Her ankle’s throbbing painfully, a reminder of everything that happened yesterday; it feels like so much could’ve gone wrong but clearly they did right by someone, karma had been kind. She can’t really walk on it yet, at all, she can tell that much so sitting and waiting until more people wake up is going to be a pain (literally and figuratively), hopefully Maggie has some painkillers she can take to dull the throbbing significantly.

She rolls onto her front and turns her head to look at Carl, she’s tempted to wake him up just so she has someone to talk to but he gets grumpy when he doesn’t get enough sleep and she doesn’t want her closest friend being moody at her all morning.

There's a knock on the door and Sophia sits up to stretch, humming hopefully loud enough for the person to hear and come in. They do, it’s Maggie’s sister who Sophia has yet to be introduced to, she smiles brightly at her and comes in quietly when she notices Carl still asleep.

”Hi, we weren't introduced yesterday but I’m Beth,” she says softly, placing a glass of water and two painkillers on the bedside table, “Maggie’s gettin’ ready so told me to see if you were awake so you could take more painkillers.”

Sophia nods, “Yeah, my ankle’s started hurting again. I’m Sophia, this is Carl,” she takes the painkillers and then sips at the water.

“I haven’t seen any kids since all this started,” Beth admits, wringing her hands and sitting at the edge of the bed, “I’m sixteen so I guess I had an easier time adjusting but you guys… I can’t imagine.”

Sophia looks to Carl and remembers how he thought his dad had been dead for a whole month, she remembers Jacqui and Jim and their old camp, “I think at first it was harder and we’re still scared of a lot… but I mean, what can you expect, we’re twelve,” she shrugs.

Beth nods just as Maggie comes down the stairs, “good mornin’, how’re you feelin’?”

Sophia shrugs again, “as you’d expect, painkillers haven’t kicked in yet so there’s throbbing but it’s not as bad as yesterday.”

Maggie nods, “you’re not allowed to walk on that for the rest of the day - I don’t wanna have to redo your stitches - but I’ll get something sorted for you over at your camp so you can see all your friends. But, this is where you sleep until I take those stitches out, alright?”

She nods eagerly, looking back out the window where the camp is coming to life again.

Beth clicks her fingers as if remembering something, “I almost forgot, your friend Merle, apparently he wandered off in the middle of the night so Rick and Shane went looking but they told me Daryl will organise other search parties to try and find him.”

“Why’d he run off?” Maggie asks, eyebrows scrunching in confusion. No one can really answer but the only thing Sophia can think of is Merle might’ve gotten sick and/or delirious or something. Maggie sighs, hitting the doorframe with the palm of her hand and rubbing the bridge of her nose, “well, maybe this’ll be somethin’ I can use to keep daddy off a war path for now.”

Beth stands, going over to her sister and wrapping her in a hug, “don’t stress yourself out too much, Maggie.”

Maggie mutters something before leaving the house and going over to Sophia’s group’s camp. Carl, in that time, manages to roll of the bed - taking the duvet with him - and onto the floor, waking himself up in a bit of a state while Beth and Sophia giggle at him.

“Good morning,” Sophia says, voice teasing as she crawls over to look down on him at the floor.

Carl laughs at her sarcastically, “hi.”

She reaches down and pulls him back onto the bed, scrunching the duvet up and tossing it on haphazardly after him. He puts on his dad’s (though technically now his) hat as she tells him about Merle and at first he’s confused but then he reassures her that “ _ it’s Merle! If anyone can survive out there alone it’s him _ ” which, granted, is true so even if they don’t find him in the next couple of days, he should be okay.

Beth brings the two of them some toast for breakfast and they’ve eaten it by the time Glenn comes in with Maggie.

“Been told you wanna come down to camp,” he says, grinning.

Sophia smiles at him, she and Carl slipping their shoes on and Carl swinging her bag onto his back as Glenn lifts her up.

“To camp!” Carl announces triumphantly, leaping down the steps on the porch and marching towards the semicircle of vehicles, Glenn with her behind, with Maggie and Beth following after them.

Amy spots them coming down and jumps into the RV, coming out with one of those folding camping chairs and setting it down by the ashes of the old campfire. Glenn sets her down in the chair and Carl leans on the back of it as people come over and check on them, the worry and relief clear in their faces and voices as they talk to them. Maggie goes over to Andrea who stands by Daryl’s motorcycle to double check what everyone’s doing for the day while Beth goes to meet Lori and some of the others in the camp.

“D’you think Merle’ll be okay,” she asks when Daryl’s standing next to them. He’s trying not to look like he’s checking up on them but Sophia thinks both her and Carl can see he is just by the way he’s standing.

Amy filled her in on what everyone’s doing about Merle before she’d run off to check on T-Dog with Glenn; Daryl had planned to look out there on his own but apparently Carol insisted she’d go with him because she didn’t want him being out there alone and it seemed like a decent chance for her to practice surviving since Ed’s gone. Andrea is taking Otis and the two of them are going to check the main roads and a small housing area in case Merle managed to stumble all the way to that place. Daryl looks down at her, chewing the top of his thumb and shifting as he waits for Carol to get ready to go.

“Merle’ll be fine,” he huffs, tone a little sharper due to his worry, “he’s the toughest guy I know even when he’s off his head.”

Carol appears then, dressed in jeans and a sweater plus boots Sophia’s pretty sure belong to Amy. Daryl grunts out a goodbye and waves at Carol to follow him, they check in with Dale as they leave, the older man in charge while Rick and Shane are gone. Maggie comes back over to them, Glenn too and then Dale comes over.

“Excuse me, Miss, what’s the water situation like around here?”

“Got five wells on our land,” Maggie replies, “house draws directly from number one,” she points towards where each well is as she lists  a couple of them, “and number two well’s right over there. We use it for the cattle but it’s just as pure, take what you need.”

Dale calls for T-Dog and the two of them head over to the well to fill some buckets with the water. Maggie looks over to her house and beckons Beth back from her conversation with Lori, whispering something in her ear and sending her back to the house, Sophia looks over and sees the girls’ dad stood in the doorway. 

“You think I’ll be strong enough to carry you one day?” Carl says after a moment of silence, leaning forward on the chair more and tilting his hat up, bringing a laugh out of Glenn and Maggie.

“The day you get strong enough to pick me up is the day I kiss you, Carl,” she responds, turning her head to look up at him.

“Deal,” he sticks his hand out for her to shake and she stares at it a moment before shaking it firmly.

Glenn chuckles, ruffling Carl’s hair, “you better get lifting, little man.”

Sophia snorts, watching Carl fix his hair just as they see T-Dog sprinting over.

“The well! There’s somethin’ in the well.”

Maggie and Glenn look at each other and Lori and Amy appear, having heard the commotion. Maggie takes off running after T-Dog first and the other three follow; Carl and Sophia being unable to do anything but watch.

Sophia’s absolutely horrified when she has to watch (from a distance!) Glenn disappear down into that well, not only that, but the fact that he basically almost dies because the only thing Sophia can think would be down there is a walker. He gets out alive but from what she sees, they won’t be using that well for the rest of the time they’re here.

Glenn comes back over and Sophia hugs him. He tells her he’s heading into town with Maggie to go to the pharmacy since Hershel (Maggie’s dad) and Beth only grabbed food and clothes when they were there last. Maggie walks past looking a little pale and Glenn follows after her saying a quick  _ see you later  _ before heading over to the stable.

* * *

Rick and Shane come back mid afternoon with no luck in finding Merle. Rick stripped of all signs he used to be a police officer and both of them simply appearing as if they worked on the farm. They come over to where Sophia and Carl sit to apologise for leaving without telling them and Sophia informs them of the places Glenn, Andrea, Daryl and Carol went to check out.

Rick leaves to see Hershel when Beth hollers over, Shane squats down by her chair and watches him leave, muttering about how a grumpy old farmhand might give Rick the run around since Maggie’s not back yet.

“Rick and I were talkin’,” he says, looking and the two of them, “been thinking ‘bout starting training for everyone - to use guns safely and probably a little knife work too.”

Carl’s eyes light up, “you mean I can learn too!?”

Shane laughs, “that’s right, you can’t keep relying on your little girlfriend to kill everythin’ for you.”

Sophia’s nose scrunches a little but Carl just laughs, “she’s not my girlfriend.”

“Uh huh. Yet. Little man. Yet.”

She sticks her tongue out at both of them when they all see Glenn and Maggie coming back from town. Lori comes out of the RV and heads over to them somewhat quickly while Maggie dismounts her horse and heads inside her house. 

Since there isn’t much for Sophia and Carl to do while Sophia’s been told not to walk too much, Shane sits in front of her chair and pulls Carl to sit with him. While they aren’t able to shoot or practice shooting yet, Shane goes through how to take apart and put the gun that Carl has back together again; he does ask if she wants to learn but she’s fine with being the quiet one out of her and Carl.

Daryl and Carol come back just as the sun sets, having similar luck in finding Merle as Shane and Rick but coming back with a number of squirrels and rabbits they immediately start preparing for dinner. Andrea and Otis return just as dinner is served, everyone eating around the campfire and talking about their days as if it’s a completely ordinary family meal; Sophia notices that Glenn and Lori seem a little out of it but has no time to ask because Amy’s talking about what happened at the well earlier for those who hadn’t been here.

Rick looks a little more than exasperated when he leaves the Greene house later that night. Shane checks on him but gets waved off so he decides to take Sophia back to the house for the night, Carl coming along to keep her company again. 

Maggie’s smoothing out the duvet when they come in. She smiles tightly at them, clearly the talk with her dad not having gone well but she doesn’t say anything. Sophia and Carl take their shoes off and she drops her bag in the same place as the night before; Maggie does a quick check of her stitches before leaving the three of them in the room.

“Are you gonna ask dad what happened?” Carl asks, kneeling at the foot of the bed where Shane is.

The man nods after a second, running a hand through his hair and sighing, “Yeah, bud, don’t you worry, I’ll make sure your dad’s doin’ alright. You two get some rest alright, I’ll make sure someone’s here for when you get up just in case anybody leaves camp before you’re out.”

The pair of them wave as he leaves the room, shutting the door behind him. They watch him from the window until he’s just another shadow around the fire and then turn the lamps in the room off to drift off to sleep.


	7. Target Practice

Sophia’s limping a lot less the next day, she’s leaning heavily on Carl or anybody else who’s next to her and she stumbles every-so-often if her ankle throbs, but overall she’s mostly okay.

Daryl and Carol have gone out to look for Merle again, but his time Rick manages to circle an area on a map Beth brings to them. Hershel’s still avoiding them but according to Maggie they’re allowed to stay until they find Merle or when Sophia gets her stitches taken out which gives them a minimum time span of seven to ten days. 

Shane’s set up a small area away from the farm for target practice, Maggie helps him sort it out in an area Hershel won’t be able to see them from. Andrea and Carl are probably the most enthusiastic to learn, Amy saying she much prefers being quiet but if this’ll help her be useful she’ll do it. T-Dog, against everyone’s better judgement, goes out to help Rick look around and Glenn’s somewhere near the Greene house with Lori and Maggie.

At training, Sophia mostly sits on the makeshift table between Carl and Amy, earplugs in her ears to make the noises a little less loud. Carl takes to shooting like a fish to water, once he knew what he was supposed to be doing he was off, Sophia’s both surprised and impressed much like Shane. Beth, who’s near the end of the lineup, keeps flinching every time a gun goes off but she’s not as bad as she looks, she hits the target with every shot, they’re just not perfect. Andrea’s similar to Carl and Amy probably has the worst aim but she definitely hits more shots than misses them.

Shane takes a good half an hour scoping out those who would be good with a gun and those who would be better with the quieter weapons like her. He asks her to take Amy and Beth over to the side with a couple knives and T-Dog’s metal baseball bat.

“Dealing with things like these,” she starts, kneeling down in front of the weapons with her weight on her good leg, “isn’t like dealing with a gun. When you shoot you can run because your bullets are useless after that but these? These are always controlled by you. If I left every arrow after I shot them I’d have run out by the first week of all this. Stabbing someone with a knife is a hell of a lot more intimate that shooting them from afar because you have to look them in the eye and recognise that you’re taking their life away; unless, of course, they’re a walker - then you’re just putting them out of their misery.”

Beth looks a little uncomfortable but nods along with Amy. The older blonde takes a knife and the baseball bat, passing them between her hands to get a good feel for it while Beth gingerly picks up the other knife.

“How do you - you know - feel better about usin’ somethin’ like this?” Beth asks, solidifying her grip around the knife and mimicking a couple of movements Sophia makes with an arrow.

“You remember who you’re fighting for and who you’ve lost,” Amy responds fluidly, swinging the bat so hard it almost slips from her grasp, “I’m fighting for Andrea, the group, and the rest of my probably dead family.”

Beth looks to her and Sophia twirls the arrow in her hand as she replies, “I’m fighting for the group, Glenn, Carl and all my friends at the orphanage who I’ll probably never see again.”

Beth breathes in, nodding and tightening her grip on the knife, “I’m fightin’ for my family, my momma and brother and boyfriend who all got sick. And I’ll fight for you if you stick around.”

* * *

T-Dog and Rick get back just as Shane and Sophia decide to finish training for the day; Carl hangs back a little to show his dad how good of a shot he is and Sophia heads back to camp with Amy and Beth. The three of them go over to sit by the chicken coop, throwing out feed and drinking orange juice from coffee mugs.

“So what’s your dad like?” Amy asks after a throwing a small handful of seed out to some chicks, “you know, when he’s not perpetually angry at us for staying here.”

Beth chuckles a little, lifting up one of the chicks to check it over, “you’ll grow on him, my daddy’s just a little… protective so to speak and with Maggie all over Glenn it worries him a little. Normally he’s one of the sweetest guys I know, I promise.”

Amy  _ almost  _ scoffs, making Sophia snicker and Beth roll her eyes playfully. There’s a holler from the RV and Beth waves the other two off to go and see what the problem is; Andrea’s on top of the RV looking out at the field through binoculars.

“Carol and Daryl are back,” she says once everyone’s gathered, “Daryl looks hurt!”

Rick, Shane and T-Dog take off sprinting through the field, they make it over just before Carol almost trips over; T-Dog and Rick grab Daryl, dragging him back to the house, passed the whole group. Shane helps Carol back to the campfire, taking her bag from her and helping her down into the camping chair.

“What happened?” Sophia asks worriedly, coming to Carol’s side and rubbing her shoulder.

“We found a lead on Merle,” the woman responds, “Daryl got caught up with walkers while I was checking out the creek and he fell, got an arrow right through him. I killed the walkers before they could bite him and then I went down there.”

“So what did you find?” Lori questions, crouching down in front of her, “what did you find about Merle?”

Carol breathes in, closing her eyes and exhales softly, “there was a hand in the water, it was bit. Merle got bit and cut off his hand, we don’t know if it means he’s dead or alive but there was barely a blood trail left because the creek water spread it all over the place. And we had to get back.”

The revelation that Merle could be dead sends everyone into a bit of shock; Lori stares at Carol, Shane runs his hands through his hair and the others start muttering to each other. 

“W-We’ll keep that in mind, Carol,” Lori sighs.


	8. The End of Safety

It’s the end of their time on the farm in a couple days, even if nobody knows it yet. It starts with Lori and Carol deciding they want to make dinner to show their gratitude to the Greene’s for letting them stay on the farm.

Nothing much happens during the day, Rick doesn’t want anyone going out after what happened to Daryl and no one can really object so it’s a quiet day. Most people go off to the shooting range with Shane and Rick, Sophia and Glenn take Beth, Amy and Carol to work with knives and the like (Carol deciding to do that since she’s been practice shooting when out with Daryl anyway). But aside from that, everyone has a calm day, 

Hershel is definitely a little against the dinner, Sophia can tell when everyone sits down; she and Carl sit at a small table with Beth, Maggie and Glenn (the  _ kid’s table  _ as it’s so annoyingly dubbed), while everyone else sits at the main table. Sophia can see how tense Hershel is, he’s trying to bite back any hard remarks for the sake of Patricia, Maggie and Beth who are the ones that have been keeping them as close to his good books as they can get them.

It’s almost awkwardly silent while everyone eats, Sophia’s table is a little more lively, each of them making faces to try and brighten everyone’s moods a little more while the adults share awkward glances and no words. 

Carl nudges her under the table when he sees Maggie pass Glenn a note (to be fair, the two of them are not subtle about it at all), they shove mashed potato in their mouths before they can laugh or give any indication that they actually saw, both of them sharing a look that meant they’d tease Glenn about it later.

Carol takes food upstairs to Daryl when everyone’s clearing up. Sophia helps Patricia dry the dishes and put them away while Beth and Carl clean them; the pair of them lose sight of Glenn and Maggie while they’re helping out but giggle at each other when they finish up and go back into the bedroom they’ve been occupying.

The pair of them stay up for quite a while into the night, the pent up energy keeping them awake and whispering to each other, they do eventually get to sleep though, practically on top of one another after play fighting to tire themselves out.

Nothing much happens the next day, she and Carl stay asleep until about midday, Daryl’s back in his tent but not really going anywhere and Glenn and Maggie go on another run into town. Everything goes wrong the day after that.

* * *

 

Glenn and Maggie seem weirdly tense in the morning, Glenn’s eyes locked on the barn all throughout breakfast. Sophia’s still a little tired but the scrambled egg Carol made brings her a little more energy; Daryl’s with them that morning too, having recovered enough to be walking around (he’s just been advised to avoid most physical activity for a little bit).

Today, Sophia wears a buttoned-up blue flannel tucked into some dusty grey skinny jeans with her jacket over the top and the usual tattered sneakers. Carl sits next to her, wearing a grey T-shirt with some kind of paw print emblem on the front of it, as well as blue jeans, a red flannel for a jacket and his hat.

Sophia’s ankle has healed a little more to the point where she can gently jog without it hurting or pulling the stitches, but still not run - especially not full pelt like she and Carl are capable of, though Maggie reassures her that when the stitches come out she should be okay so long as she doesn’t fall over, get the wound dirty, or get hurt again in the days after her stitches are removed.

Glenn stands up suddenly, but no one pays him any attention except her and she taps Carl’s hand to get him to look at the other boy too.

“So - uh - guys? The - uh - the barn’s full of walkers.”

_ That  _ gets everyone’s attention. All head’s whip around to stare at him in shock, disbelief, terror. Shane demands he take them over there and he does, practically the whole group follows, including her and Carl. When they get over there she takes Glenn’s hand as Shane goes over to the barn doors and peers through the small gap between them; Sophia can practically hear the walkers groaning in there. It’s then that Dale admits to knowing about it before everyone else; he says Hershel sees the walkers as sick people that can be cured but apparently Beth and Maggie have been drifting away from that idea for a while which is why they’ve been so involved with their group. His admittance causes a bit of an uproar with Shane but it’s quickly defused by everyone holding him back.

“What’re we supposed to do?” Amy asks a little frantically, “we’re guests we can’t just screw with their property but why’re they keeping  _ walkers  _ in there?”

“Amy, it’s fine,” Shane says, holding a hand out to placate her, “Rick and I will figure this out, alright? Nobody needs to worry about this but if it comes down to it I will make a decision for the benefit of the group.”

And they pretty much leave it at that. The group scatters to try and take their minds off the walker-filled barn; Andrea heads off to the shooting range with Carol and Dale while Amy and T-Dog head towards the well area to practice with the bat they now kind of share. Lori takes Carl back to camp and Glenn leads Sophia away too, Daryl, Rick and Shane linger the longest.

Glenn leaves her with Lori to go find Maggie but she and Carl don’t really stick by the other woman for very long before they scamper off. Carl has his gun tucked in the waistband of his jeans again but he tells her he’d rather watch her practice with her bow today; so they go and find a spot a little ways away from camp and find a tree to use as a target. She rolls up the sleeves of her jacket and stretches her fingers before grabbing her bow.

“You’re getting really good,” Carl praises, watching her land her shot in the middle of the ‘X’ they carved into the tree. It’s her best distance yet and she’d jump with excitement if she didn’t think it would pull at her stitches.

“Thanks,” she laughs in response, “Now I just need to practice with  _ moving  _ targets.”

* * *

 

Shane makes the final decision on the barn at sunset when he sees Otis and Hershel taking walkers inside. He orders Beth to take her and Carl away so they don’t have to see any of what’s about to happen, she does, probably because she doesn’t want to bare witness to anything either.

She takes them to the stables, she’s shaky and so are they. Carl’s hand keeps hovering over where his gun is and Sophia’s practically itching to have her bow in hand.

“I’m just gonna - uh - show you guys how to saddle a horse,” Beth says, squeezing her eyes shut when the shouting starts.

The pair of them engage with her to try and keep all of them distracted. Beth picks a horse called Buttercup that she says is the most social, she lets them pet her and groom her a little before she starts going through the steps to saddle her up just as the shooting starts.

“They’re not people, Beth,” Carl says softly, titling his hat and helping her tighten the reins around Buttercup’s snout.

“I- I know,” Beth stutters out in response, cringing as more gunfire goes off.

Sophia puts her hand on Beth’s arm, “everything’ll be fine.”

Everything, in fact, becomes far from fine. The gunfire stops and then the shouting starts hardly three minutes later, and then there’s more groans. People scatter. The three of them run to the entrance of the stable, there’s a herd, a big one, drawn out of the forest by the noise. Beth screams and tries to run out when she spots a group of them come down on Otis and Patricia but she and Carl grab her arms and pull her back into the stable, but not before seeing Dale go down too.

“Get up, go we gotta get outta here,” Carl exclaims, tears running down his face as Beth climbs up onto Buttercup.

Sophia shoots down a walker that gets too close to the stables, abandoning that arrow to climb onto Buttercup and then help Carl up onto her too. Beth grips the reins, letting out another lone sob before flicking the leather and sending Buttercup sprinting into the forest, away from the farm as the barn bursts into flames and lights the dark sky.


	9. Alone

Buttercup rides through the forest, everything looks the same and Beth doesn’t make her slow down until they’re by a creek and a hunter’s cabin; devoid of walkers that are miles away at the farm in ruins. 

Beth slides off Buttercup, tears streaking down her face as she takes the reins to lead the horse still holding Carl and Sophia into a small added stable attached to the cabin. Sophia watches the older girl close the stable door and lock it, shrouding them in darkness until Carl pulls a lighter from Sophia’s bag so Beth can light the few lamps that dot the stable.

“Otis used to come out here,” she says, hugging her arms around her body as Sophia and Carl climb down from Buttercup, “he built the stable after a storm because he didn’t want the horses gettin’ hurt if they stayed out here with him.”

Sophia goes over to her as she collapses to her knees in the hay, trying to suppress her sobbing and hiding her face in Sophia’s shoulder when she sits down next to her and curls her arms around her midsection. Carl takes a second to come over too, checking Buttercup before kneeling down next to the girls and taking Beth’s hand.

“It doesn’t get easier, losing people,” Sophia says when Beth calms down, pulling back to brush away any remaining tears from her cheeks, “we’ve lost a few - before the farm and now Dale’s gone too… but you get better at recovering faster.”

“You’re still allowed to grieve,” Carl adds, Sophia nods along, “but in a world like this you only have so long to be upset about it before it could get you killed.”

Beth almost laughs, wrapping her arms around either child’s shoulders and pulling them into her sides, “how’re you two more mature than me?”

The three of them laugh tiredly, atmosphere a little lighter though still very bleak. They stand up and Beth leads the way into the dark, empty cabin (each of them petting Buttercup before they go in); she takes Carl’s lighter again and goes around the main room to light candles and lamps Otis had left there when the world ended.

“Thank. You. Otis,” Carl breathes, looking around the dimly illuminated area and falling into a slightly tattered armchair by a window with closed curtains. 

Sophia sighs, dropping her bag at the foot of the sofa and dropping onto it, sinking into the somewhat flattened cushions. She throws and arm over her eyes as Beth goes around to make sure windows and doors are locked as well as covered by any find of curtain; even going as far as pushing the coffee table in front of the main door before sitting down in the final armchair in the room. 

“What do we do now?” Carl asks, tilting his hat up to look at the two girls.

Sophia sits up, resting her back against one of the armrests on the sofa and stretching her legs out, “what about the highway? D’you think they’d head back there?”

Her friend bites the inside of his cheek, eyebrows scrunching as he shrugs with a lot of uncertainty, “I dunno… I dunno if dad or the others would risk going back the way the walkers came.”

Beth bites the skin on top of her thumb, a habit that reminds Sophia of Daryl, “I don’t think I know how to get to the highway from here anyway… so we might just have to drift for a while.”

Sophia lets out a small groan, twisting onto her front and letting her arms hang over the armrest, “for now can we just take a break? I think we’re all emotionally exhausted.”

The other two hum in response, despite the probable danger they could be in by not putting anyone on watch, they’re all too tired and lonely to care. They all curl up in their seats, drawing warmth from only the clothes on their backs and the minimal heat provided by the candles and lights dotting the room.

* * *

Sophia shoots a squirrel from a tree the next morning, she grimaces when she does it, never having hunted before and usually not thinking about the fact that Daryl shoots cute, little woodland creatures for dinner.

She picks it up by the end of her arrow and tries not to gag at it; she’s going to have to get used to it, she knows it. She goes back to the cabin, Beth having set up a small cooking station just outside the front door; Carl’s already there, a few twigs attached to his clothes after, Sophia assumes, he’s climbed a few trees looking for eggs.

“Do you know how to skin a squirrel?” Carl asks, a little skeptical and looking at the older blonde with furrowed eyebrows.

Beth takes the squirrel from Sophia, dislodging the arrow with a disgusting squishing sound and handing it back to her. “As much as I hate it, I helped Otis a few times when nobody else was home, so I have practice.”

Carl tends to the fire before running inside to get plates, Beth takes her knife and begins to, somewhat messily, skin the dead animal, and Sophia starts scrambling the eggs as best she can from her limited experience in making them at the orphanage. When she finishes, she plates them up and Beth’s able to start on cooking the squirrel Carl helps cut up; Sophia goes into the stable to check on Buttercup and feed her with what she can find in the main cabin and the stable (which isn’t much aside from the old hay scattered around, and she doesn’t know enough about horses to be able to find scraps for her).

The eggs taste a little weird when she goes back out to eat them and the squirrel meat Beth divides between them. While the fire’s still lit, Sophia goes into the cabin to grab a thermos she’d found when looking for some food for Buttercup; she fills it with the creek water and sets it above the fire to boil and hopefully (if she’s doing it right) purify the water to an extent that shouldn’t get the three of them killed before they make it to a neighbourhood or something that has clean water.

“How did you get that bruise? I never asked before,” Beth asks as they wait for the water to boil. 

Sophia shrinks a little, hand going to the faded mark she almost forgot is there, “Carol… she - uh - didn’t have the best husband. Where we camped before, in a quarry, he didn’t really hide how he was and one afternoon I was helping Carol and Amy with laundry and he just wanted to shut down our fun and take Carol away. I guess I panicked, I stabbed him in the leg with one of my arrows and he just… hit me.”

Beth’s eyes grow sad and she reaches out to rub her arm, “well clearly he ain’t around anymore. And from the sounds of it, you were pretty brave.”

With Sophia’s bag the only one they have, she sits in the stable to sort through most of her things and for everything they’re going to need inside until they can find a place Beth and Carl can get backpacks too. The water thermos goes in first after she’s emptied the bag’s contents onto the stable floor; she leaves all the clothes since the other two only have the outfits they’re wearing plus there won’t be any time or point in changing clothes until winter hits, so she sticks with the clothes she’s wearing; she puts her book and comic roll in there as well and wraps some of the hay Buttercup is eating in the only clean shirt she has before putting that in there too. It’s a little lighter when she puts it back on, quiver adding the most weight but the clothes taking a good amount away - plus, there’s still a lot of space to throw food and other weapons in there if necessary.

The trio set out on Buttercup again when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. Beth holds the reins and Sophia sits at the back with her bag on, Carl squished between the two, his hat slightly blocking Sophia’s view of the forest in front of them. Buttercup’s hooves crush the leaves littering the ground rather loudly, but the area still seems devoid of walkers so the group isn’t too put off by it yet.

Moving onto the road makes them slightly more anxious. Sophia thinks this little back road probably connects to the highway at some point but she can’t be sure they’re even heading the right way. They’re open on all sides and Buttercup moves a lot louder but with the road being mostly empty, it’s definitely easier for them to get away from a small group of walkers should they show up. 

They definitely don’t find the highway, instead they come to the closest housing estate (which Sophia’s sure Andrea and Otis had checked out when looking for Merle). Beth moves Buttercup back into a more forested area when she spots walkers lingering on the main road. Carl suggests finding a house with one of those gardens that opens out straight into the woods so Beth gets as close as she can to the estate to look for one. 

They narrowly avoid other walkers lingering in the woods and make it to the end of a street, a garden fence knocked down and opening the house out into the forest. Sophia slides from Buttercup and her feet hit the floor with a  _ thud  _ that makes her wince a little. She pulls her bow and an arrow into her hands as Beth and Carl watch her from Buttercup.

The garden is empty, grass overgrown and flowers already winding around an old swing set positioned next to a tool shed. Through the windows in the shed, she can see that there aren’t any walkers hiding away in it. She slowly makes her way to the back in the house, Carl dropping off of Buttercup behind her and coming up next to her with his knife; Beth stays atop their transport and watches their surrounding carefully. There’s a garage connected to the house, a large space they could probably fit Buttercup in, so she shed Carl to check it out while she peeks in the back window facing the kitchen.

The room looks a little ransacked from what she can see, but it doesn’t look completely cleared out which is a good sign for them. Carl comes running back over to her and she crouches away from the window.

“All clear, no walkers, no car.”

She nods, “good… you wanna try and get Beth and Buttercup in there and I can check the house.”

He returns her gesture and runs back to grab Buttercup’s reins. She turns to the back door to find it unlocked but not broken into; she takes a deep breath, staying in her crouch to sneak into the house. She knows the kitchen is empty so goes in there to start, looking through the cupboards to find several abandoned cans of different foods plus a pantry half full of snacks.

She takes an arrow from her quiver and twirls it between her fingers, tiptoeing into the living room and sighing in relief when nothing’s in there either. She turns to the staircase, balling her hand into a fist and banging on the wall with the side of it; she doesn’t hear any movement but with the barricaded stairwell it doesn’t look like anything could get up or down there anyway.

The garage is connected to the house via the kitchen and she leans through said door to see Carl and Beth petting Buttercup in the dark.

“House is clear.”

So this is where they’ll be staying for a little while...


	10. Educated Guesses

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Baby chapter this week, enjoy :)))

Sophia looks at her ankle in the middle of their second week hiding out in that house; she doesn’t like the look of it and the same evening she removes the stitches herself as best she can. It’s messy, she bleeds, but she wraps her wound with a thin scarf she takes from the sofa next to her, and it doesn’t look any worse than it had before, which she takes as a good sign. Dealing with it is one of the bigger educated guesses Sophia has to make.

Beth’s birthday is sometime late October, almost a whole month before Sophia’s but only a couple weeks before Carl’s. The trio take a guess on the month based on the weather and Beth counting the days as best she can. 

Carl and Sophia spend the days running up to it hunting the neighbourhood at early morning to try and gather things to make the older girl feel better on her special (guessed) day. They’ve been out on their own for almost a month at this point so the prospect of ever seeing their families again has somewhat dwindled which motivate the two to make a normally familial event feel as special as it ordinarily would be. 

Beth appreciates the sentiment, accepting and pulling on the yellow sweater Sophia gifts her with teary eyes and hugging the two children into her sides when Carl hands over the checkered scrunchie that has a little bunny-ear bow tied into it (Beth ties her ponytail with it very quickly and jokingly saying she looks way more country now than she had before). 

The best they can do on the cake front is sticking a candle to the side of a can of peaches with sticky tape. It’s their last tin and the two younger kids know that Beth likes the peaches way more than either of them do or ever will, so it seems appropriate to let the birthday girl have the last of them. 

She wishes for her sister back. That wish doesn’t come true.

They make another guess around the time of Carl’s birthday, Sophia finds him a slightly tattered fleeced denim jacket (a little too big for him) but Beth pitches in to make it a duo present by sewing up all of the rips and holes. The pair of them have to go on a trek through a ransacked corner shop just to find Carl’s favourite brand of tinned pudding; taping a match to the side of it to work as a candle for the boy to make his birthday wish.

He wishes for his dad back. That wish doesn’t come true.

By the end of November, Carl and Beth prepare for Sophia’s birthday; it’s the first one she’ll have outside of the orphanage. It’s bittersweet. Carl gives her a silver necklace with a foxtail charm on the end and Beth gifts her a simple, multi-coloured handkerchief to tie around her ankle and hide the bulky scar that’s taken up a good potion of it. The birthday treat she gets is a big packet of dried apple slices she’d been craving for too long; Carl just holds her candle.

She wishes for Glenn and maybe Shane to find them. That wish doesn’t come true.

Sometimes they think their educated guesses are pointless and stupid, but then Sophia remembers that if they stopped then things wouldn’t feel normal. They have to make things as normal as possible or they might give up hope; they’re thirteen and seventeen for god sake and as far as they’re aware their families are  _ dead _ . Hope is the last thing they have.

So educated guesses they keep on making.


	11. Winter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Catching up to my prewritten chapters ^^’ whoops, hopefully I can binge write a bit between studying but if updates slow down a little just know it’s because I’ve had very little time to write recently.

Winter hits them slowly. It’s starts with the nights getting colder and then the days start getting shorter which doesn’t let them scavenge or hunt as long. 

They’ve all gotten older, tougher, sharper. Carl finds a suppressor on an old army guy when they pass by the fenced off high school, he’s able to get it without too much trouble and fit it to the end of his gun; Sophia keeps his hair trimmed and out of his face, his hat hiding most of it as he never takes it off, a reminder of his parents. Sophia keeps her hair tied in a short ponytail most of the time, the strands greasy and hardly washed; no matter what she wears she always has Shane’s jacket on, the sleeves only needing to be rolled up a couple times as she’s gotten taller - she’s still taller than Carl. Beth starts braiding her hair when her ponytail gets too bushy but she always uses her rabbit-eared scrunchie, she’s gotten far more skilled with a knife. Being out here without anybody protecting you makes a person paranoid and wary but also an excellent survivor.

Sometimes they talk about the farm and their groups, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes it’ll start because Beth misses Maggie or she has a nightmare about what she saw happen to Patricia and Otis. Sometimes it’s because Sophia and Carl miss Dale and his weird stories or because they just want someone to treat them like the kids they used to be before they escaped the farm. Sometimes they’re vulnerable and sometimes they pretend they aren’t.

They’re exploring a small cul-de-sac when they meet a new friend. By this point they’ve been holed up in the same house for a week, leaving Buttercup in the garage to loot a few places for warmer clothes and any more food - they’ve almost run out and they’re already thin from rationing a little too much. 

Carl’s the leader, crouching by the back door with his gun in his hand, hat on his head; he’s wearing thick snow boots that are a little far from his size, jeans with frayed ends and four layers on his torso: a tank top, a t-shirt, a flannel and a his fleece lined jacket.

Sophia follows behind him, arrow notched and string pulled back slightly to make a quick shot if she needs to. Around her neck is her necklace, and she wears a pair of walking boots she took from a small sportswear store several miles away, thick grey socks and matching skinny jeans with a rip at the left knee, on her torso she has on a long sleeved t-shirt, a big, red knitted sweater and her jacket, badge and all.

Beth’s at the back, knife held tightly in her left hand while her right makes sure the band-aid on her cheek is secure and hides any trace of blood that could’ve been on her face. She wears almost a mash-up of Carl and Sophia’s outfits: snow boots much too big for her, skinny jeans with the only flaw being the patches of dirt and blood over them, a flannel and her thick yellow sweater; she also has on blue earmuffs.

They make their way into the house quietly, it’s messy but with the sun filtering in through the windows they don’t trip over anything. Carl sends Beth to check the kitchen and waves for Sophia to head upstairs while he checks the other bottom floor rooms. 

Sophia has to climb over the railing to get onto the upper floor, someone having barricaded the top of the staircase with shelves and desks and chairs, very similar to when they’d found their current place of residence. She keeps a tight grip on her bow as she goes to the first room, it’s a bedroom, scarily clean but nothing worthwhile hiding inside. There’s a noise from the room at the end of the hall and Sophia tenses, creeping carefully over to the room and pressing her ear to the door. 

It sounds like someone’s inside and Sophia knows that she has to take them out before they realise her group are inside and looting the place. Survival. That’s all it is. She throws the door open quickly and is about ready to shoot her arrow when the person inside starts crying. It’s a little girl, probably only a couple years younger than her or Carl; she’s cowering in the corner of the bedroom with a gun pointed shakily at Sophia and a small stuffed alpaca next to her.

“Carl, Beth,” Sophia calls, tilting her head but not looking away from the crying girl and not lowering her arrow either.

“Please - Please don’t shoot me, please,” the girl begs, sniffling and trembling.

“What? Sophi- oh,” Carl’s voice carries down the hallway until he gets into the doorway and sees the girl. He puts a hand in the small of her back and she slowly lowers her bow just as Beth comes in.

“Oh my god,” Beth gasps, taking a small step into the room only for the girl to move her gun around a little frantically.

Carl holds a hand out slowly, crouching down to be level with the girl, “woah - woah, calm down we’re not gonna hurt you. My name’s Carl.”

“M-Mika,” the girl stutters.

“How old are you, Mika?” Sophia asks softly, putting her bow and arrow away to crouch beside Carl.

“T-Ten.”

Carl smiles a little tightly, “oh yeah? Me and Sophia here? We’re thirteen. And Beth? Beth’s the oldest, she’s seventeen.”

Mika looks at the three of them and lowers her gun, practicality pushing it into Carl’s hands so that she can grip her alpaca.

“Why’re you here on your own?” Beth asks.

“My dad and m-my sister… they went out three days ago and t-they haven’t come back. I-I think they’re dead.”

After that they just take her with them. She’s definitely very reserved at first and clings to Beth like a lost duckling. They all stay in the house they've been occupying for a couple days while Mika gets used to a new group dynamic and then they take Buttercup and head back into the forest; they don’t travel for too long, unsure as to how long their friend can go with four relatively small people on her. 

Mika doesn’t ask about their old group until it’s been about a week since her joining the group. They’re taking a break up in the trees, one of them on branches of different levels but all on the same tree and not too far apart. The three of them talk as if everyone in that group is dead - because to them they practically are. Carl talks about his parents, Shane, Dale, Jim and Jacqui. Sophia reminisces about Glenn, Amy, Andrea, Carol and even the Dixon brothers. Beth mumbles about Maggie and Hershel and everyone else she’s lost. In exchange Mika tells them stories about her sister Lizzie and her dad, how much braver they were than her and how she never thought she’d be able to survive without them.

With Mika part of the group, Beth makes an executive decision to stay at whatever base they’re in with Mika whenever Carl and/or Sophia go on runs for supplies with Buttercup; she’s never really been one for that kind of thing anyway (even back at the farm when there was a much lower risk of getting attacked). 

They don’t like to talk about the horde, that found them just after Christmas, that not only took their friend and transport, but almost took Sophia and Carl with it - they have the scars from their escape to prove it.


	12. Wandering

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for missing last week’s upload, I caught the flu so was pretty out of commission the whole week. Today’s Christmas though and I got a new IPad which means great things for writing because this is way better than writing stuff out on my phone.   
> I figured since I’ve managed to get this chapter done I’d post it as a bit of a Christmas present for all of you so I hope you enjoy!

Carl’s the one that sees the prison first. He leaves the girls in their small camp to go scouting the area and runs back to show it to Sophia from the hill they’re on; it’s somewhat of a distance, but it’s a prison so it has walls and maybe some kind of community has already developed over there.

By this point it’s been about two weeks since Mika turned eleven, they’ve finally fallen into early March. With the weather getting warmer, they’ve all left a lot of their winter clothes in Beth’s bag, saved for the next time it gets cold, and traded out for clothes better fit for spring.

Sophia stands by where Carl is crouched. Her hair is still tied in its winter ponytail and fingers twirling the foxtail charm of her necklace; she’s wearing a pair of, what used to be white, tennis shoes, the colour ruined by mud, rain and leaves. The shoes leave the multi-coloured cloth around her ankle fully visible. She wears a grey t-shirt with yellow accents, over which she has black dungarees with the ends rolled up to just under her knees and her usual jacket. Her bag is on her back as normal, bow gripped loosely in her hand in case a walker wants to sneak up on them.

Carl still has his hat, hair recently trimmed but kept at the length he likes and looking as messy as the girls’. Due to the warmer weather, he’s forgone his fleeced flannel in favour of an ordinary, red plaid shirt with a sleeveless leather vest over the top; his jeans have minor rips and his trainers are about as muddy as Sophia’s. His gun sits in the waistband of his jeans, shirt tucked behind it to allow easy access and he has a bag on his back too, filled with food and ammo like Sophia’s.

They’re looking out across the forest below them and eyeing the building that’s tauntingly close; they could make it by nightfall. The wind blows some of the stray strands of her hair into her face so her focus finally breaks away from the structure to push the strands back behind her ears.

“We’ve lived out here for nine months, you think it’s worth the risk?”

The question falls from her lips before she really realises what she’s saying. Carl looks up at her and stretches to stand, shifting his hat and sparing one last glance at the building before they both start walking back to Beth and Mika.

It takes him a second to answer her, mouth twisted in a disappointed frown, “not really, it’s more likely to be overrun than a safe place for us; you and me can take down a few walkers by ourselves but there’s probably way too many for us down there.”

They step under the small line of cans tied between a couple trees and enter their current camping ground (having stayed there for the past couple days). A small fire is burning in front of Mika who’s boiling some water and Beth’s standing by the two sleeping bags they have, head flipped over to tie her hair in a ponytail.

Mika looks at them as they approach, hair pulled back in two French braids going down her back and tied with elastic bands; she wears a simple brown polo shirt, black leggings with a few rips, and boots hardly her size. She doesn’t have a bag like the rest of them, but her knife (similar to Beth’s) is hidden away in her left shoe; she looks every bit like an innocent little girl, no one needs to know about her less than innocent killing streak.

Beth smiles brightly when she hears the line of cans shake a little, tightening her ponytail with her usual scrunchie and picking her bag back up from its place next to the sleeping bags. She wears a black sleeved baseball shirt, sleeves rolled up to her elbows and showing off the murky bandage wrapped around her lower right arm after a tussle with a thorn bush the other day. Her shorts are a light blue with frayed ends, a belt around her waist holding both her two knives; her feet are covered by black converse and she has a visible scar under her eye from that scratch she got during the winter.

“You think it’s a good idea?” The oldest of them asks, crouching down to begin rolling up the sleeping bags, both to be tied to the sides of her bag.

“We can’t risk it,” Sophia responds a little dejectedly, folding her arms and shifting her weight on her leg, “we should probably head back towards the road or something, the open space means we’ll spot walkers sooner than they see us.”

Mika holds a water bottle between her legs, putting out the fire underneath the bowl of water and letting it start to cool before looking back up at them, “how far are we supposed to go? If we follow the highway for too long we’ll end up dehydrated and hungry, we need to find more people.”

Sophia looks at Carl when he hums, a memory flashes in front of her eyes, back when they were both a little happier, the quarry camp and the farm, running around like nothing mattered. Looking at him now makes her wonder if she looks as tired or just as much older as he does. 

The lack of adult, authority figures has been hard, making decisions has fallen to herself and Carl because Beth doesn’t trust herself not to get them all killed, especially since she didn’t really learn much about survival before their group showed up on her farm anyway; Mika trusts all of them, sometimes she offers ideas or suggestions, and they always ask for her input, but for the most part, keeping them alive has been attributed to Carl and Sophia.

“Let’s just go back to road, it’s our best bet if we really want someone to spot us at this point,” Carl says after a minute.

He goes back to the line of cans to untie them and put them back in his bag while Beth continues wrapping up their sleeping supplies and Sophia helps Mika bottle up the water and pack all of that away in her bag. They do a quick double check of the area before they head back to the edge of the hill overlooking the rest of the forest.

Carl leads the way, gun drawn, while Sophia keeps up the rear with her bow at the ready. For the most part they don’t encounter anymore walkers than they had on their way down and they know the forest like the backs of their hands so making it back to that dull, hopeless road is disappointingly easy.

They wander, walking up the road in the direction they’re pretty sure they had been heading before they veered off to camp. Then again, even if they are heading all the way back to town it’s not exactly going to make much of a difference; they could walk all the way back to the quarry and nothing of their current situation would change. So they walk.

* * *

They walk through the rest of the day and the subsequent night, Sophia carrying Mika when the younger girl grows too tired to push on like the rest of them. They walk far enough to know that they aren’t heading back towards the old housing estate, in fact, they walk so far that nothing looks familiar at all.

“You sure you don’t want to check that prison?” Beth asks once again, holding onto Mika’s hand and looking back the way they came dejectedly, “if we go any further there’s no chance we’ll find our way back.”

Carl sighs, shifting his hat and looking back before his eyes harden a little, “there’s no point, Beth, the longer we stay there the longer we keep our hope alive and that’ll end up getting us killed.”

The blonde goes to fight him but Sophia pipes up, “what Carl means is that the longer we stay in the area, the longer we’re fooling ourselves into thinking everyone could still be alive. That puts us all at risk, we have to let it go if we want to survive independently.”

Beth’s frown deepens but Mika squeezes her hand and she sighs. They slowly start moving again when a shout echoes from behind them; they all turn, expecting a horde or maybe some poor dying soul. There _ is  _ a horde, but it’s following a completely fine group of people, all African American from the looks of it.

“Shit!” A large man with a beanie cries, spotting them backing up along the road as they get closer, “run kids, run!”

Carl grabs her hand and their quartet bolts, a little ahead of the new people but within range that they’ll probably spot where they’re going. She and Carl aren’t running full pelt, they’d lose Mika and Beth, but it still reminds Sophia of that time, it feels so long ago now, when she and Carl were running from walkers by accident. They had been reckless back then, naive and afraid; they’re still afraid, but they’re smart and calculated and they know how to survive. Sophia likes to think Glenn would be pretty proud of her.

A young boy, maybe a year older than Beth, sprints just in front of them, clearly aiming to lead them all somewhere. They skid into a completely new town, quiet and lonely but the boy clearly knows where he’s going as he takes winding turns he wouldn’t take without knowing they’re there. Sophia looks up at the fire escape the boy starts climbing and her mind flashes back to when she had been in Atlanta with Rick and Glenn on scarily similar circumstances.

Beth pushes Mika up first and both girls make Carl go after her, Sophia has Beth go after, an arrow aimed down the alley as the three adults with the boy come down, the groans not too far away.

“Sophia!”

She spins, climbing up as fast as she had back in Atlanta and accepting the boys help as he all but shoves her through an open window and into an apartment, Carl makes sure she doesn’t fall. 

When the boy and his friends drop inside the room, sliding closed and locking the window, Sophia and the others shrink back into one corner close to the kitchen; Carl’s hand slips into hers and she hears his gun click.

“Woah,” the big guy hushes, dropping his weapons onto the ground and holding his hands out in surrender, “there’s no need for that, kid, we don’t wanna hurt you. I’m Tyreese.”

Sophia stares at him for a good second, even grabbing Beth’s arm when she starts to take a step forward. Her eyes flick to the other three people and Tyreese looks at them until they start dropping their weapons on the floor too, though the woman does it a little reluctantly and the young boy seems a little too focussed on Beth to really fight.

“See,” Tyreese smiles, gesturing to the array of guns and knives on the floor, “we’re good,” he then claps the woman on the shoulder and his smile grows, “this is my sister, Sasha, her boyfriend, Bob, and this guy,” he gestures to their youngest, “is Noah, picked him up off the side of the road when this all started.”

“I’m Beth,” Beth introduces herself eagerly, breaking from Sophia and Mika’s holds to step closer to these people. Sophia lets out an internal scream but she and the other three introduce themselves after a second of being stared at.

“You the leader?” Sasha asks their oldest, eyeing them all with a raised eyebrow and clearly a little out off by Beth’s friendliness.

The girl blushes but shakes her head, looking back to Sophia and Carl and rubbing her arm, “they are, kinda.”

Bob squints, “how old even  _ are _ you kids?”

“I’m seventeen,” Beth responds and Noah’s eyes seem to light up, Sophia lets herself smile a little.

“Thirteen,” Carl answers, holding up their held hands to signify its the same for her as well.

“Eleven,” Mika perks up, bouncing on her heels and fiddling with the ends of her braids.

Sasha looks at them, even more skeptical now, Sophia watches her eyes look them all up and down, zeroing I’m on certain aspects of them before she speaks. “So you’ve had two thirteen year olds deciding what you do? For… how long?”

“Nine months,” Beth answers diligently, “and they’re a little more accustomed to living out here than I am. Used to live on a farm, you know, they learned to survive a lot earlier than me so I trust them more than I trust myself.”

Tyreese’s smile doesn’t seem to leave his face, even when Sasha whispers to him about Beth’s bandage. He looks back at Noah and mutters something into his ear before the boy takes a few steps towards them, she and Carl shrink back a little but Beth doesn’t even flinch when he reaches out and takes her elbow.

“We got a few supplies,” he says, gesturing to the kitchen area, “can clean this up for ya.”

“I’d appreciate that,” the girl replies and Sophia  _ swears  _ her cheeks are tinted pink as she follows him into the adjacent zone.

Sasha only stares at the youngest three for a few more seconds before she turns her attention back to her boyfriend and they go across the room to the more lounge-style area: Tyreese, to his credit, stays where he is, looking at them with soft eyes and a smile that reminds her endearingly of Carol. Mika offers him a timid smile, trotting over to him and looking up with her oh-so-innocent eye, enough to make any man, especially one as soft looking as Tyreese, melt at her feet.

“You’re welcome to stay with us as long as you want, kids.”


	13. New Territory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s probably still Sunday for most readers but it’s almost 3AM and Monday for me so here’s the update of the week!  
> Happy New Year everyone, have a good 2019 and see you there.

Sophia isn’t quite sure what to feel for the new group. Noah seems friendly enough and he and Beth have been almost attached at the hip ever since he fixed up her bandages, and Sasha and Bob haven’t really done much to get on her bad side as of yet. Tyreese is probably her favourite, he’s done the most to get to know her and Carl, and Mika is very happy when they sit together and talk (though Sophia suspects that part of that’s to do with the new doll he brought back for her from a run after she mentioned her old alpaca one time).

It maybe takes two or three days for everyone to be on complete speaking terms, Noah broaching conversation with Carl after Beth and the two boys eventually getting along like a house on fire. Bob has a running joke with the two of them after a particular run the trio went on that somehow makes carrots the funniest things in the world (not even Tyreese has any clue, so it’s not a guy thing, it’s just a weird _them_ thing). Noah treats her and Mika like their his little sisters and it feels nice to have someone treat her like Glenn used to, it makes her remember, but, there’s no harm in remembering. Sasha takes the longest of the quartet to warm up to the kids, but it happens by, about, the fourth or fifth day of them all hanging out in the same apartment and working together. Sophia wins her over when she lands a shot to a walker’s head (said walker had been attacking the older woman) from the balcony of their apartment; even for Sophia it had been a pretty good shot, and she’s only gotten better from there.

Sasha always seems a little reluctant to let anybody younger than Beth go out on runs, which irks Carl a lot more than it irks her (that’s not to say that every time Sasha fights them on going out she doesn’t get pissed off - because she does), but Beth seems to see the logic in it and is practically trying to prove to these people that she is more of a leader than she or Carl (which Sophia isn’t completely mad about, just annoyed that she’s doing this _now_ rather than on the road when they could’ve actually used her leadership). Luckily, Tyreese more often than not calms both girls down and goes with whoever wants to go out at the time so Sophia’s been getting a better lay of the land than when they’d been sprinting through it, plus, Tyreese has been able to see more of her skill set that even Sasha seems impressed by when he relays their runs to her.

* * *

“Are you sure it’s clear?” The man’s voice crackles through her radio, one out of the only two Noah had found in a local electronics store.

“Tyreese,” she almost giggles, peering through her not-great-but-works-fine telescope at the parking lot he’s trying to run through, “I’m higher up than you and I can see perfectly fine. It’s clear,” she reiterates for his paranoid soul, feet shuffling a little nervously on the flat roof of the building she’s on.

“Okay,” he mutters, “if I get bit it’s entirely your fault.”

She rolls her eyes, watching him jog across the concrete, hatchet out and at the ready, “yeah yeah, you and Sasha are awfully alike, you know that?”

She can see him mumbling something (probably sarcastic) to himself from where she watches him and allows herself another little giggle. He hops across the parking lot, bouncing between parked and abandoned cars despite each of her comments about absolutely nothing being over there.

“So what _exactly_ did Sasha want?” He asks once inside the pharmacy, she can’t see him now, so he’s on his own until he wants out and back to her position.

“You are _so_ lucky I had Beth write up a second list,” Sophia replies, digging into the back pocket of her jeans to pull out the scrap of paper she’d shoved in before they left, “Okay, Sasha and Beth both _specifically_ wanted tampons, nothing specific so just grab whatever, and Beth needs a refill on her pill, she says to _try_ and find Aubra Birth Control but if you can’t find that anything _should_ do. Bob and Noah both said they’d feel better if you picked up some more bandages and normal painkillers, and Carl asked if you could find something for his headaches but he didn’t know if they would fall under the same painkillers the other two wanted so I added that anyway.”

She gets no response but assumes Tyreese looked for everything as she listed it off and would hopefully be out soon since it’s starting to get dark and Sasha gets more anxious the later they come back. She paces atop the roof for a few minutes, twirling the telescope in one hand as she holds the radio in the other close enough to her face that she can talk straight into it when he needs her again. While he searches she thinks back, to almost a week and a half ago now, and wonders if that prison is still as barren and abandoned as it looked then; she doesn’t know why she thinks of the place, it’s not like it’s a particularly important place, perhaps it’s just because they’re with more people now.

“Soph, am I good to head your way?”

She perks in the direction of the parking lot, telescope flying up to her eye as she spares the area a quick once over, “walker to the left of the red station wagon and another by the yellow mini.”

She spies him leaving the pharmacy, heading around the station wagon to take out that walker, managing to worm past the mini and the walker stumbling by that to, he promptly makes it across the open space and she loses sight of him again as he goes through the streets to get the building she’s on. She goes to the edge of the building, clipping the telescope and radio to her belt and pulling out one of her arrows as she drops down onto the big bin then into the back alley as Tyreese comes into it.

“Place was already pretty ransacked but I got what I could,” he says a little breathlessly, the pair starting back towards the apartment building at a speedy jog.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine. We’re eight competent people, the bandages and medication should last us at least until the end of the month if we’re smart and don’t waste the pain meds when we don’t need to,” she says reassuringly, taking down a walker quickly and quietly with an arrow to the head, picking it up on the way past.

“Oh kid, sometimes I forget how smart you are.”

* * *

Sophia tosses Noah and Beth the radios, shoving some of the leftover food into her bag and catching Mika’s doll as the girl slides it across the floor to unlatch the window. Sasha rushes in from a room down the hall, a room with a better window to scan the area for anymore incoming walkers, her face says it all and that makes Bob rush into the adjacent bedroom to grab whatever the couple had in there. Tyreese rumbles through a quick list of supplies with Carl before he yells out an order to roll out and _now_.

Sophia goes first, clambering out of the window and pulling Carl out with her, Noah and Beth follow after, the four of them filling the fire escape balcony and looking out amongst the swarm at the end of the alley.

She dresses in her old sneakers, black high-waist shorts with a blue button-up top tucked into it and her jacket over the top of that; her hair sits in a pair of bushy pigtails over her shoulders, her necklace hides beneath her shirt, and her ankle is wrapped as normal. Carl stands in an ordinary t-shirt and jean combo with a denim jacket over the top with the sleeves rolled up to free his hands, his hat covers his scruffy hair and both the jacket and t-shirt are tucked behind his gun.

“Oh why’d this have to happen now?” Noah moans, bouncing his leg before throwing himself over the rail and landing in a crouch on the alley floor. His eyes scan the two entrances to the street before pointing down the much thinner one.

Noah dresses in a simple hoodie and jean match-up, Beth dressed similarly after having ‘borrowed’ one of Noah’s jackets to wear over her tank top, hair tied in a simple ponytail. Mika hides away in a slightly too big jumpsuit, a thin sweater on underneath the sleeveless torso and hair tied in one continuous braid over two.

She and Carl drop down by themselves, flat sneakers doing nothing to stop the jolt of the landing running up their legs. Beth falls into Noah’s awaiting arms, still not particularly graceful but Sophia still thinks that’s just her excuse for the boy to hold her. She and Carl catch Mika in a combined effort while Tyreese, Sasha and Bob drop down of their own accord, an entire apartment worth of stuff on their eight backs.

Tyreese has his signature black beanie covering his head, his outfit almost entirely black from his fingerless gloves to his boots. Sasha has matching gloves though her outfit consists of more browns and a coat with lots of pockets over black. Bob wears a simple polo shirt and sweatpants, not the most stylish but comfortable and practical for him to run around in.

They clear out onto the street as the alley fills with walkers, Sophia and Carl running up to lead with Noah, now having a better lay of the land than they had on their first run through. Convenient, that their introduction to this place would also be their departure. Hordes are a bitch. They pass by a number of already cleared out stores, heading back to the forest but in a direction they hadn’t been going before; hopefully they’ll find someplace new, be that a barn or a town or something else. So long as it’s safe.

“We’re going back in the shitty forest again?” Carl grumbles indignantly, folding his arms and frowning at the sight of trees again.

“Language, Carl,” Sasha reprimands, “and yes, we’re going back in the forest because if we travel far enough _through_ the forest we might actually find something that’s not forest.”

Mika looks equally annoyed at the sight of the familiar greenery again, kicking a twig across the dirt path they’re roughly following, “it _is_ pretty annoying to see this place again.”

Sophia watches Sasha roll her eyes and pats Carl on the shoulder to try and quell his teen angst.

“Yeah, well, we have to go back through this place if we wanna find anything, do you guys really have to be going through your petulant child phases _now_?”

“Sasha, we’re gonna be going through our ‘petulant child phases’ until we stop being teens and preteens,” Sophia half laughs, earning an amused snort from Noah.

“I almost forgot how spindly these trees were,” Beth mutters, snapping a thin branch off a tree as she passes it.

Bob makes a sarcastic comment about defiling nature as they continue on, Sophia runs a little ahead with Noah at her side and shoots down some sparrows and squirrels just in case they don’t find much shelter before nightfall, hooking them to her backpack like she’d seen Daryl do a few times. She thinks they pass by a direct path to that prison but doesn’t dwell on it too much as she stops by it to continue walking by Carl; Sasha only spares the path a glance, clearly not seeing anything worthwhile down it before passing by Noah and taking the lead.

As they break through the trees and onto a main road, Sasha turns around, a small, smug smile playing at her lips, “ _see_ , a road. We just follow this and we end up somewhere more populated.”

The rumble of a car engine startles them from their conversation, Bob and Tyreese reaching forward to pull Sasha back off the road and into the trees. A familiar looking car whizzes past - but it could be - Sophia, Carl and Beth immediately run into the road, tentatively waving down the car, much to the confusion of the others.

To their credit, the car stops, pulling over at the side of the road and the engine dying as their group of eight ever so slowly approaches it. The first people to step out of the car are two complete strangers, one being a woman with a sword and the other a really tall man; at first the trio think they got the wrong car, but then, then Rick, Daryl and Shane climb out, looking down the road with expressions Sophia can’t decipher from how far away they are.

“Dad!” Carl cries out, her mind flashes back to their first time at the quarry camp, and he drops his bag to take off running.

Sophia follows quickly, dropping her pack and sprinting after her friend, she’s pretty sure Beth does the same but he mind is too focused on getting to _them_. Carl and Rick are on the floor by the time she reaches Shane, he picks her up off the floor and stumbles back into the car as she wraps herself around him and lets tears fall into the man’s shirt. She isn’t quite sure how long they all stay in their positions, but eventually Shane puts her down and Rick pulls her into a tight hug instead, Tyreese and the others making their way over just as she goes to wrap her arms around Daryl’s waist (he surprises her by not flinching backwards, instead giving her a gentle pat on the head).

“H-How? How are you still alive?” Rick stutters, wiping tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand.

“We had a lot o’ luck,” Beth replies with a small smile, taking her bag back from Noah as Carl and Sophia do the same from Sasha and Tyreese.

“You been helping them?” Shane asks the five of them.

Sasha shrugs, ruffling Carl’s hair under his hat and Mika moving over to take Beth’s hand, “only for about two weeks now, though, they’ve definitely been a bigger help for us than we have been for them.”

“Why are you out here?” Sophia asks after a second, looking between the familiar trio and the two strangers, “and who are they?”

Daryl sighs, running a hand down his face and looking between them, “a lot’s happened, kid, right now we’re heading out to save Glenn and Maggie from some stranger.”

“We’ve lost people… gained some too,” Shane says, something clearly preoccupying his mind before running a hand through his unruly curls to try and wipe the thoughts away.

“You’ll have to catch us up,” Beth says, smile tight as she rests a hand on his bicep. Then, she turns to the members of their group the others don’t know, “this is Mika, we met her over winter, and as Sasha says, two weeks ago we met her, Tyreese, Bob and Noah.”

“You say you’re going to save Glenn and Maggie? I want in,” Sophia says when introductions are over.

Rick and Shane look at each other, having some silent conversation before nodding at each other and looking back to them.

“Shane will take Beth and your friends back to where we’re staying, ask them a few questions and get them sorted with the group. You and Carl stay with me, do not leave my sight, this is dangerous.”

Carl immediately takes her hand as they both nod, looking back at the others and smiling as Shane goes to fully introduce himself and start walking back the way the car came from, throwing a wave over his shoulder before Beth and Noah finally follow after him. Rick introduces the two strangers as Michonne and Oscar, Oscar stares at them a little worriedly, Michonne slightly wary, and Sophia can’t blame them, if they’re bringing kids that means Rick’s either stupid or said kids are pretty dangerous. Carl and Sophia would vouch for the second.

Michonne immediately goes into a leading role, despite the limp Sophia can see she has. Apparently these people (who neither Carl nor herself have any idea about) have patrols, so the group is better off going in on foot, even if the walk is a mile. She notices Rick hang back a little, whispering a conversation to Daryl that he clearly doesn’t want anybody else to hear.

She does stop, though, when she hears walkers, ears perking at the sound. She tugs Carl back and he immediately grabs his gun (she’ll say she didn’t see Rick’s worried eyes at the suppressor on the end) and she, her bow. The other four stop and stare at them, but then the walkers get louder and Daryl notices, alerting the others and proving that they aren’t just paranoid kids trapped in this forest for too long.

Rick has them attempt to thin the small group out, Carl’s shot still as true as ever and her arrows piercing eyes and heads; they take down two each, Sophia managing to grab her arrows again before Rick’s leading them away from the ever growing horde.

They find a cabin not too far off the beaten path with wooden boards covering up the door and windows. Rick rushes inside, pushing everyone in after him before he shuts and locks the door completely. Carl gags the minute they’re closed in, scent of the dead permeating their nostrils; this is different to the walkers outside, she knows that before she spots the dead dog in the corner. Animals don’t turn.

Daryl goes further inside the dark space, Sophia still has her bow at the ready and Carl’s at her back just in case. She ignores the dead trying the push their way in, but doesn’t manage to hold the little squeak of fear as a man shoots up from the bed, waving around a rifle and trying to get them out.

“I-I’ll call the cops!” The man yells, way louder than Sophia would have liked.

“I am a cop!” Rick hisses in return, volume lower but still forceful, “now, I need you to lower the gun,” he slowly sinks to the floor, putting his weapons on the floor, “don’t do anything rash, let’s just take this nice and slow.”

Sophia raises her arrow when the man raises his gun, Carl gripping her jacket in case they need to move around the cabin quickly. The two of them duck on instinct when he fires the gun, Rick grabbing the man in a headlock but not for very long, the man bites him and starts sprinting in the direction of the door.

Sophia shoots him down before he can get much closer to them, an arrow through one of his eyes, clean and perfect. He’s not the first man she’s killed, not the first person Carl’s seen killed or killed himself either, but it’s the first for Rick and Daryl, for them to see what the world has done to her if not both of them when Carl sighs in relief and simply yanks her arrow out of his eye to clean with his shirt and hand back to her. Luckily, they don’t get much aside from _more_ concerned stares before Rick and Daryl are throwing the man out to the walkers to keep them distracted. The back exit is clear, so that’s where they go, sprinting past the front entrance and back to the path they had been on.

“Clean shot,” Daryl mumbles to her, Rick probably having a similar conversation with Carl a few feet ahead of them, “first guy you killed?”

She shakes her head, “no. Four more over winter a little after we met Mika.”

“What’d they do?”

“A shitty group of guys that were gonna do something that would’ve traumatised us worse than killing them did.”

She hears him hum, feels him place a hand on her shoulder and squeeze it before he talks, “the others, Carl, that Mika, Beth? They killed any of them?”

“They were about ten people, Carl took out five others, and Beth only killed one because he got too close to her and to doing what he wanted to do. Mika wasn’t involved in that fight but she’s killed plenty of animals with me.”

“Winter ain’t been easy, huh?”

She wishes she could say it had been.


	14. Reunited

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy first update of 2019 !
> 
> School has started again and I have exams this week so hopefully I can find time to write but next week’s update might be sliiiightly late if not postponed til the week after.
> 
> Either way, enjoy, we get more reunions next chapter so you can look forward to that

Sophia follows behind Oscar as they make it to their destination, it’s dark and they’re blending in with the shadows pretty well (Shane’s jacket luckily being a dark colour and being about as long as her shorts). She hops through the grass, peeking over the car at the makeshift wall the place has put up, it actually looks quite fortified and she probably wouldn’t have minded living there if she didn’t know the leader as a crazy asshole kidnapper.

Michonne runs off before anybody even says anything and no one can stop her. Rick just groups the remainder of their group together to discuss what they’ll be doing.

“We need to downsize,” he says, swapping guns with Oscar and looking at her and Carl to drop their bags in the bush with their own, she takes a few arrows and stores them in the inside pocket of her jacket.

“I was thinking,” she whispers as they shuffle weapons around, “after all this we should send a couple people in, people they wouldn’t have seen before. You know, to get information about this place in case this crazy guy tries attacking us.”

“Spies,” Carl nods, “sounds like it could work.”

“Who would you send in?” Rick asks, clearly curious about the idea.

“Tyreese and Sasha, maybe Bob, they look pretty harmless but also since they’re new to this group they won’t be known the them in there if Glenn or Maggie have said anything.”

Daryl and Rick share a glance, she hopes they think it’s a good idea since she wants to be useful to this group again. A twig snap turns everyone’s weapons behind them but it’s just Michonne, she gestures for them to follow her so they do. They sneak into some kind of storage room/cafeteria style place, apparently it was where Michonne had been questioned when she was here.

Daryl peeks through the nearby window, almost growling at the sight of people, “I thought you said there was a curfew.” He looks back to Michonne.

“The street is packed during the day, those are stragglers,” she replies simply.

Rick, looking out of a second window, whispers back to them, “anyone comes in here and we’re sitting ducks. We gotta move.”

“They could be in his apartment,” Michonne says.

“What if they ain’t?” Daryl grumbles.

“Then we’ll look somewhere else.”

Sophia and Carl share a look before he speaks up, “we don’t have all night, we barely have a few hours, especially if we wanna get back and talk to Ty and Sasha about this spy idea.”

“Are there any kind of jail cells around here that you know of?” Sophia asks, “because they’re probably being, if not already have been, interrogated for information, I don’t think this guy would do it in his apartment where people might see his not-so-nice side.”

Daryl hums, seemingly in agreement, “we just split up, cover more ground.”

Their conversation is interrupted by a knock at the door and some keys jingling. There’s a slight panic for a moment, the six of them rushing into the back room to hide.

“I know you’re in here,” the stranger calls, “I saw you movin’ from outside. Alright now, you’re not supposed to be in here and you know it.”

Rick (quietly) slams the man into the adjacent wall when he comes too close to discovering them himself.

“Shut. Up. Get on your knees. Hands behind your back, zip tie him.”

The man drops, Daryl coming around to his other side and zip tying the man’s wrists together.

“Where are our people?” Rick asks, voice quiet and deadly, “you’re holding some of our people. Where the hell are they?”

The man shakes his head, body trembling, “I-I don’t know”

Rick gags the man before Daryl knocks him out and they drag him across the room to hide him. They hear gunshots in the distance and leave the little building, weapons drawn to follow the commotion and hopefully find Glenn and Maggie. 

Sophia isn’t sure what kind of building it is they go inside, but she’s pretty sure this is the kind of interrogation room she was talking about before, so hopefully their people are here. She and Carl keep up the rear, sticking close to one another and making sure they can see Rick and Daryl at every turn. They hear voices, she swears she hears Merle, but she doesn’t have enough time to dwell on it before Rick throws a flash bang and smoke bomb, and they’re being ushered back the way they came. 

Daryl gestures for them to stay put while he and Rick go in to grab Glenn and Maggie, she leads the way out when she sees them come around the corner. They turn, into a little shop and Glenn drops to the floor, he doesn’t look good and she figures he needs something the make him feel a little better.

“Glenn, hey, Glenn,” she calls, dropping onto her knees by him and tapping his cheek. Maggie stares at her, eyes wide, and she stands to pull Carl into a hug without thinking.

“So-Sophia?” He mumbles, eyes scanning her over before stopping at her face, “you’re alive? You’ve gotten taller.”

“I’m alive, Glenn, and I need you to be too, okay? So don’t you pass out on me,” she smiles at him, he sits up as best he can, wrapping his arms around her in a hug she’s been wanting for months.

“Rick,” Maggie calls after pulling away from Carl, “how did you find us?”

“How bad are you hurt?” The man asks instead, looking towards Glenn as she helps him stay sat up.

“I’ll be alright.”

“Where’s that woman?” Maggie asks then, Sophia looks around and Michonne’s just gone.

Rick mutters something before looking out one of the windows into the street, there’s people yelling, clearly looking for them and Sophia can only hope they get out. 

“Want me to look for her?” Daryl asks.

“No, we gotta get him out of here,” Carl and Rick say in unison, looking at one another before back at Glenn and the rest of their group.

“Daryl,” Glenn calls, Maggie coming back over and wrapping a jacket around him, “this was Merle.”

Sophia  _ knew  _ it, she would recognise that redneck voice anywhere. But why? Why would he attack one of his own like this, especially throwing a walker at him if what Glenn’s saying is true. 

“W-Why would he do that?” She asks him, eyebrows scrunched together.

“I don’t know, okay, he seemed pretty pissed off when he thought you were dead though, probably thought I deserved this for losing you.”

“Hey, I am not  _ anybody’s _ excuse.”

“My brother’s this Governor?” Daryl asks, voice laced with confusion.

“No,” Maggie answers, “somebody else, your brother’s his… lieutenant or something.”

Sophia stands, Carl immediately moving forward and taking ahold of her wrist.

“I’m sorry,” Glenn groans, “we told him where the prison was, we couldn’t hold out.”

“You guys are staying in that place?” Carl asks without meaning to, “we saw it before we ran into Ty and the others… but ‘Phia and I didn’t think it was safe.”

“It wasn’t, but we cleared it out,” Rick replies, “now nobody feel bad about any of your decisions, you got that? All of you did what you did to survive.”

They all begin making plans to leave, Daryl wants to go after Merle (quite frankly Sophia does too, if only to slap him for hurting her family and using her as an excuse) but Rick makes a good enough case for him to stay with them and help in getting them out. 

They leave when Carl thinks the coast is clear enough, Daryl throws out another couple smoke bombs and then they get moving. Rick and Oscar start shooting at the guards on the wall they need to get over to get out. She and Carl don’t do much, not wanting to waste their ammo better for stealth, but they help Glenn move across without getting hit; they all take cover in another doorway. 

With them being cornered, Daryl hands her and Carl a couple guns, small but with a lot of firepower, he gives them the fastest crash course in how to use them just in case they get split up. Daryl throws another smoke bomb, good for everyone to run through, she loses Carl in the smoke, the boy running off with his dad while she sticks close by Daryl. She watches Oscar go down from the corner of her eye as she shoots down one of the oncoming men but she and Daryl don’t dwell on it too much before Rick’s calling them to follow them over the wall, he pushes her in that direction and she doesn’t see if he follows or not while Carl pulls her onto the bus.

They run back to where they’d started, Sophia and Carl grabbing their bags from under the bushes and at the ready to go running back to the car. Daryl’s not out yet and she fears he’s stuck around to grab Merle (mostly because she didn’t stay and help him), either way, Michonne pops up out of nowhere, covered in blood and looking like she’s been in a fight. They need her, she knows it, Rick knows it, even Glenn - whom Maggie is helping stay stood - knows it.

“Look, all of you head back to the car, wait there until morning, I’ll hang around here for Daryl… and probably Merle,” she says to break the tension.

“What?” Carl immediately goes into defence, “no, we can’t leave you, if they see you you’ll be outnumbered.”

“But if they see all of us then they’re more likely to shoot,” she argues, the two of them facing off like they were back to being on their own through winter, “if it’s just me I can work with the innocent kid thing, I’ll be okay, I’ve done it before.”

Carl takes a step closer to her, grabbing her shoulders and staring at her with pleading eyes, “but last time Mika was with you and you’re weapons were a little more discrete.”

She grabs his hands, pulling him into a hug, “I’ll be okay, Carl, I promise.”

Rick looks at them as they pull away from each other, crouching down to their level to look her in the eye, “if you’re not back by dawn I’ll come down and bring you back myself, got it. Under no circumstances do you go back into that place alone.”

She nods, gripping her bow in her hand and giving Carl’s hand a final squeeze, plus Glenn another soft hug before Rick is leading them back in the direction they came in earlier that night. Now, she waits.

**Author's Note:**

> I already have a couple chapters pre-written (they're all very long) so I'll probably post them weekly but not on a specific day. So if you enjoy this just expect something at some point every week and if I get a little too antsy and want to post it might turn into two a week if I write ahead that fast.
> 
> Also, I made a discord server for those of you who want to talk to me about this fic or any of my others <3
> 
> https://discord.gg/Becs2DG


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